There's a better life out there for those still hooked on dial-up Internet connections such as AOL, MSN and Earthlink. Dial-up has been useful, but it is quickly giving way to broadband connections such as cable and DSL. To us at POSitouch, credit card and remote support connections work better with broadband, says Chris Odediran of Positouch NY.


There's a better life out there for those still hooked on dial-up Internet connections such as AOL, MSN and Earthlink. Dial-up has been useful, but it is quickly giving way to broadband connections such as cable and DSL. The death knell on dial-up is sounded by its speed limit of 56k. In effect, you can only access the Internet at this maximum conceivable speed imposed by the modem.

With high-speed, also known as broadband, there are various speed options possible, depending on how much you can spend, but even the slowest is many times faster than dial-up. In terms of cost, speed, service options, most point-of-sale businesses can benefit awfully from broadband Internet. To us at POSitouch, credit card and remote support connections work better with broadband.

In addition, broadband conections allow several computers to connect simultaneuously, at high speed. Besides, you have the opportunity of VOIP telephony, by which you can save cost on telephone services by making calls via the Intenet.

Airnet simplies the differences between dail-up and broadband with the following facts:

Basic Facts About Dial-Up Internet

• As the name suggests, dial-up Internet requires a connection to a phone line to get Internet access.
• The highest speed of this connection is 56 kilobits (KB) per second, though it is more often slower.
• Dial-up services is common, but it is slow and unreliable, especially at peak usage times.
• Business use of dial-up plans can quickly become more expensive than some broadband plans. Every dial-up connection is subject to toll charges just like business voice calls.
• Effective businesses don't have time to waste waiting for slow downloads, tying up of their phone lines and being disconnected at inopportune times.

Basic Facts About Broadband Internet

• A broadband connection is always on, always ready to work.
• Broadband does not require a dedicated phone line.
• Broadband is a high speed Internet service that utilises a transmitting device such as an Airnet radio unit.
• Most broadband services are at least 10 times faster than dial-up, and provide you considerable time savings and less frustration.

You can hold on to your dial-up if none of the following situations apply to you. But if they do, you'll appreciate the faster transfers that broadband provides and cannot wait much longer for your broadband connection:

• Do you regularly send or receive email attachments?
• Do you spend part of your day, at least 30 minutes, on the Web? Cable or DSL will save you hours of time each time you connect.
• Do you plan to share a network connection and have more than one computer have access to the Internet?
• Do you want alternatives to your modem-based credit card system? Broadband credit card settlements are faster.
• Do you want to free up one of your phone lines, especially like the one dedicate to your Positouch support. You can use the same phone line for DSL without interference.
• Do you want to poll your restaurant data to web-based intefaces, that allows you to access your daily reports on the Internet. Data moves better with broadband.
• Do you want to quicker, better remote support via pcanywhere from Positouch, or use remote connections to your office from home?

Broadband gives you that speed you crave. With a high-speed connection, you can pull down files in seconds rather than hours and display Web pages and remote connections faster than you can blink.

If you are ready to upgrade to high-speed Internet, you have four major options facing you --cable, DSL, fixed wireless or satellite. More details of your options can be read from http://reviews.cnet.com/. According to CNET, the following are the advantages and disadvantages for each of the options:

CABLE
It's speedy, cheap, and seems to suffer fewer installation nightmares than DSL.
Advantages:
Stability and availability. Forty-six percent of U.S. homes have access to cable Net service. If you're after broadband, your most likely source--perhaps the only one, other than satellite--is cable.
Cable boasts the fattest pipes of any broadband option, with maximum theoretical speeds in the unbelievable range of 27Gbps. Real-world speeds, however, are a whole lot slower, with top ends closer to 2Mbps, and average speeds in the 500Kbps to 1Mbps range. That makes cable two to five times faster than basic DSL, and as much as 36 times faster than a plain-Jane 56K dial-up.
Quick installation. It often takes weeks to get DSL installed. Not so with cable, where the average wait is only days. Cable's two years in the business have streamlined the process; all it takes is a visit from the cable guy, a new coaxial cable to a special modem jacked into your computer, and new filters on your cable lines so that TV programming doesn't interfere with the data stream (and vice versa). If you already have cable to the house for TV, you may even be able to do all the installation yourself, saving both time and money.
Cost. Which brings us to cable's third pro: the price. Although your local cable company sets the price, typical monthly fees run $35 to $45, compared with about $40 or $50 for DSL and fixed wireless and $70 for satellite. Installation and hardware fees sometimes cost hundreds, but most services include cable modem rental in the monthly fee and charge about $100 to set everything up. Plus, cable gets even cheaper if you already subscribe to cable TV. Time Warner Cable, for instance, adds its Road Runner cable access for about $40 per month to its digital cable package, while noncable subscribers have to fork over $50 each month.
Disadvantages:
Crowded lines. Cable, like satellite and fixed wireless broadband service, is a finite resource that you must share with others. If none of your neighbors have cable access, your surfing speeds may skyrocket, but when crowds hit the Web--particularly at peak evening time slots--you may see speeds plummet to sub-dial-up numbers.
Security. Speed aside, security is a touchy issue when it comes to sharing a cable connection. Is that teenaged hacker living two blocks away snooping inside your computer? Not likely, but cable's shared nature gives you another reason to protect your PC with a personal firewall.
Interference from above. Radio frequency (RF) interference and even weather affect cable performance.
Doodling upload speeds. Like other broadband options, most cable accounts are asymmetric, meaning the download speed is faster than the upload speed.

DSL
Prices vary tremendously, though, because there's no such thing as standard DSL. DSL speeds range from a slowpoke 256Kbps to a blazingly fast 15Mbps. Newer DSL lines, such as the Verizon FIOS, are many times faster than cable.
Advantages
Steady speed. DSL beats other broadband options hands down in one respect: it doesn't make you share the line with the rest of the neighborhood. With DSL, you get exactly what you pay for.
Business-friendly choices. DSL is also the obvious choice for home-based and small businesses, which often need a fat pipe to the Net. DSL is the only broadband option with universal multiple speed/pricing schemes, each with its own bandwidth.
Your DSL line doubles as a phone line, even when you're online. If you currently use a second line to dial up and log on, you'll save money by canceling that line.
Bad weather won't affect your connection's performance.
Disadvantages
Hacker-friendly connection. DSL shares its weaknesses with virtually every broadband connection. Among the bad news: as an always-on connection, typically with a static IP address (which means that the address never changes), DSL is vulnerable to hackers. But you can put up a software firewall to guard your computer without breaking the bank.
Geographic difficulties. Although DSL is much more available this year, physics still intervene. Unless you're within about three miles of the telephone company's switching center, usually called the central office, or CO, you can't get DSL. And the further you are from the CO, the slower your connection will be.
Poky upload speeds. Nearly all DSL service is asymmetric (the download speed is faster than the upload speed); a basic DSL account typically zips downloads at 384Kbps but uploads at a relative poky 128Kbps.
Clunky installation. Nightmare tales of DSL installation, configuration, and trouble-shooting--with repeated visits by clueless technicians--are legendary and legion. DSL is far from plug and play. Worse, it sometimes takes weeks to get DSL installation, while cable companies generally get up and running within days. The biggest players are the safest, and that means steering toward one of the Baby Bells, such as SBC, Qwest, BellSouth, or Verizon.

FIXED WIRELESS
This is the new kid on the broadband block. The term fixed wireless encompasses a slew of technologies, including cellular, radio, and microwave. In each case, transmission towers connected directly to the Internet transmit and receive data to and from your PC. To communicate with the tower, which can stand as far as 35 miles away, you have to mount a small rooftop antenna--some are as tiny as a VCR videotape; others, such as the one Sprint uses, are about a foot square--and connect it to your computer. The system works a bit like satellite service, but it's a lot more down-to-earth (literally).
Advantages
Straight speed. Want superfast surfing and downloads that seem to simply tumble onto your hard disk? At download speeds up to 2Mbps (1Mbps standard), fixed wireless matches cable, beats same-priced DSL and satellite.
Super-responsive. Fixed wireless suffers less from latency--the time it takes data to make it to your computer--than satellite, the other DSL/cable alternative, does. That's because the distances are much shorter between you and the transmitter.
Disadvantages
Dangerous enterprise. The recent economic downturn has kicked the stuffing out of every broadband option, and wireless is no exception. For now, only a few can get fixed wireless. Analysts expect the market to grow, since it costs less to build transmission towers than to lay cable or phone lines.
The madding crowd. Unfortunately, crowds kill speed in the fixed wireless world. Like cable and satellite, fixed wireless relies on sharing bandwidth with lots of users.

SATELLITE
Want to get your Internet from space? Satellite is speedy, but it'll cost you. The satellite ISP technique differs only in degree from the way satellite TV dishes work. When you request a Web page, a satellite receives the info from your dish, which is connected to your PC via a modem and coaxial cable. After bouncing off the "bird" and down to the provider's headquarters, it's passed along to the Internet, just as if you were using a landline such as cable or DSL. The page reaches the HQ, gets beamed up, bounced off, and reaches your dish. Satellite doesn't come cheap. The beauty of satellite, of course, is that you can get it nearly everywhere. As long as you can set the dish somewhere with a clear shot to the southern sky, you're set.
Advantages
Space is everywhere. Getting to the Web via satellite has one, and only one, benefit worth mentioning: it's available in areas where DSL, cable, and wireless aren't. Satellite shines in rural locales, small towns, suburbia, and places where distance prevents DSL or cable--mostly because it's the only broadband option.
Disdadvantages
Costly and awkward. The only reason you're considering satellite is because you can't get cheaper broadband. But you heard it here: satellite costs hundreds more than other broadband routes.
And getting that signal from the satellite to your PC--neither Starband nor DirecPC work on anything but a Windows 95/98/NT/2000 computer--is a major-league pain. Not only do you have to spring for the pricey hardware, which includes a USB modem that plugs into your PC, you have to line up the dish, a task that sometimes daunts even professionals.
Shared bandwidth. Once you're online, you have to fight for bandwidth with other dish users.
Big Brother and big weather problems. Another major flaw: both DirecPC and StarBand monitor your use and temporarily slash your speed if you're a high-volume downloader. That's unacceptable. And ugly weather--rain, snow, and even heavy cloud cover--sometimes disrupts or slows down your connection.
Slow response time. Worse, the extra-long latency--the time it take data to bounce up to the satellite, then down to your dish--means that real-time game-playing is impossible; your browser hesitates a moment before loading pages, and even audio chat may be awkward and slow.

At Positouch NY we can work with you to arrive at the best option for your business needs. We have installed hundreds of broadband connections. Our staff consists of professionals with various certifications, including MSCE, CCNA, A+, among others. Hundreds of our clients are benefiting from our affordable but effective broadband Internet installations finished with software and hardware firewall, together with professional anti-virus implementation that hardly ever fails. We can also give you a do-it-yourself solution which your company's IT consultants can integrate into our systems without any headache. Talk to us without delay to see what we can do for you.

CC Productions has the expertise to give advice on, implement and support POS Internet setup and security. Call 1-800-507-5554, Ext 1 for professional solutions for setting up and securing your point-of-sale system.

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