If the high-speed-access market is to be ruled by the 56-kilobit modem, what's to become of the fabled cable modem? One thousand times faster than the average model, these boxes were supposed to have merged the country's 64 million cable subscribers onto the Internet.

Current estimates put the number of users at about 25,000, and the two biggest cable modem players, Time Warner and TCI, both pushed back the date of major market deployments planned for this year.

Several obstacles are holding up the process, including the cost of upgrading existing one-way cable networks to handle two-way communication, which is estimated to cost $125 per subscriber. TCI's @Home network says that of its 44 million cable modem subscribers in North America, only 2 million are using two-way lines.

Though it won't solve the upstream communication problem, the cable modem market should grow now that some manufacturers are planning to build the devices right into the PC. Nevertheless, Jupiter estimates that only 8 percent of the market will be using cable modems come the millennium.

 1. Push
 2. Windows CE
 3. 56K
 4. Cable Modem
 5. Web-TV
 6. Net Magazines
 7. Apple's Demise
 8. Mac Clones
 9. E-Cash
10. Comdex '96

 1. Dynamic HTML
 2. New Domains
 3. Metered Bandwidth
 4. Web-TV
 5. Rich Ads
 6. The Big Chill
 7. Middlemen
 8. Digital Detente
 9. Cybercommerce
10. Web standards