Rev It UpLonging for faster Internet access? Check out these new and upcoming options.

Interest in the Internet has reached a fever pitch. Growingnumbers of individuals and companies are posting Web pages. Andthese pages are increasingly sophisticated: Instead of just text,they're likely to contain multimedia and video elements, andeven connections to a company database.

But all the bits and bytes required to transmit this informationcan really bog down computer performance. To improve performancewith these new applications, you need a bigger pipeline to shufflebits and bytes between your computer and the Web. In other words,you may need a faster modem--if not now, then most probably withinthe next year or two. (Of course, some performance problems are dueto excessive traffic on the Web. If you can't get on at all; orif you access a Web site, see that there's a text-only versionof the page, call that up, and still experience poor performance,there may just be a lot of Web traffic.)