ABSTRACT
Logging in over a telephone modem is no major time waster, but extracting information, especially video, graphics, or audio files and pulling it back down the wires to a local hard drive for leisurely perusal is a huge bore. There are literal bottlenecks in the Internet's plumbing that do not permit the efficient use of the high-bandwidth flow of data the cable modems require. Technical complications aside, even the folks with cable modems capable of downloading data 350 times faster than regular telephone modems are still looking at the same static Internet. Combining Zenith Electronics Corporation and US Robotics hardware, the hybrid system would use a telephone line to send data requests to the cable operator's head end studio and then switch to the "big pipe" cable to download the internet data at a high-speed rate.
