On 1 Mar 2004 11:41:11 -0800,
(E-Mail Removed) (jameson) wrote:
>He asked me why dont all our computers with USB ports use the USB port
>as the netwotk connection... he says "USB is 400-and-something
>megabytes fast! That blows a 10/100 away!"
>He asked me what sort of additional cost this would incure, what the
>downside is and what the upside is... My fear is that I would have to
>buy new switches and routers for this..
Yesterday I read the following message that seems related to your
question:
-------------------------------------------------------------
"Warren" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.modems.cable
Subject: Re: driver for cable modem
Date: Sat, 28 Feb 2004 18:02:14 GMT
> Would you care to elaborate on the disadvantages of using
> the USB interface to connect to a cable modem? I'm just
> wondering what benefit I would gain from adding a NIC.
The speed of the USB bus is significantly slower than Ethernet. While
it's still faster than what you'll get out of your cablemodem, that's
only true if your cablemodem was the only device on the USB bus.
For a USB cablemodem connection to work, two devices need to be
working:
The USB cablemodem driver, and the USB root hub. (If additional hubs
are in use, they need to be working as well.) Also note that the
default power settings in Windows is for the USB bus to go to sleep
when the computer is not in use. In many cases when it wakes up,
connectivity to the cablemodem does not return, and the machine needs
to be rebooted. (You can change that behavior in Windows.)
USB was designed to be a jack-of-all-trades, while an Ethernet NIC
only does one thing. USB works great for low bandwidth devices like
mice. It works great for bursting devices like the printer you uses
for a few minutes here and there. It doesn't work as well for a
continuous high bandwidth device, especially if it's sharing the bus
with other devices.
In other words, USB is like those multi-tools. They're great for all
those odd situations you come across, but if you've got a tight bolt,
you're still going to want a real wrench.
I'm not aware of any USB cablemodem that has drivers for anything
other than the Windows current operating systems. This matters if
sometime in the future you want to dual-boot (or change) to a Linux
OS, and could matter when the next version of the Windows OS comes
out. (The cablemodem manufacturer may choose not to update their
drivers. It's unlikely that a standard NIC won't work in an updated
Windows OS. Even if the manufacturer doesn't update the drivers,
nearly all NIC's will perform acceptably using one of a couple of
standard drivers.)
When you consider that the typical home user who doesn't already
have a NIC is almost always going to have an empty PCI slot, and that
installing a NIC is as simple as unplugging the power source, and
snapping a card that may cost as little as $5 or $10, moving to a NIC
card is a worthwhile thing to do.
Warren H.
---------------------------------------------------------
HTH
Geo
Similar Threads
Linear Mode
