...Feeling Better??...

Oh boy, did I pick the wrong week to fall ill. After, reading through the power points for Chapter 6, I just wanted to crawl right back into bed. Where the earlier chapters proved to be easier to learn once reading through a few times, this new chapter proves to be much confusion and agony. Out of the things I did understand I managed to pick up on some of the telecommunications media

I'm sure there are quite a few younger people who aren't lucky enough to remember using dial-up modem connections. Along with the slow connection and whirl-wind sound of the modem connecting, the dial up of the past also forced one to pay a monthly service fee to a specific company in order to use the connection. For example, ATT or AOL were two of the bigger companies that I can think of off the top of my head. I also remember that there were minute plans that you could subscribe to, if you needed only a little bit it was much cheaper than unlimited (if it was even offered back then). Connection was slow at best, and it took forever for pictures to download, forget about watching videos or other media type activities.

I remember being super excited when my stepdad splurged and purchased a cable modem. Much faster connection, not to mention the fact that you could use both the internet and the telephone at the same time without either disconnecting. The invention of the cable modem made it possible to view pictures and watch videos, because of the much faster connection. Pages load up at a speed that makes it appear that everything downloads at the same time, whereas with dial-up connections you could actually see line by line loading.

Over my birthday weekend at my parents house earlier this year, I got the chance to use the newest innovation to internet connections, the fiber optic cable, by Verizon. I did notice an incredible increase in the speed of the connections and the loadability of each site, but I also discovered a flaw. Every time the phone would ring, the internet would disconnect, and would not reconnect until after the call went to voice mail. Reminiscent of the days of dial-up, I knew right away that something was wrong. My step dad seemed happy that I had discovered this bug, instead of him during a web-cast work meeting. Verizon did come out and admit that they had a few kinks to iron out, but all in all this new connection is super fast and ultra reliable. Now if my poor mom could just get a faster computer to go with her new fast internet.