Look mentioned...
No limits: Need for high-speed service drives Internet access competitors
TORONTO (CP) -- While cable and telephone companies wage a high-profile advertising war over which offers the best high-speed Internet access, they're in for stiff competition from several directions.
A small Toronto-area company working with home builders, for instance, is installing residential fibre-optic cables that are 10 times faster than the speediest cable or phone alternatives.
Another company, Look Communications, plans to deliver faster-than-cable Internet over the airwaves to homes across Ontario and Quebec by the end of the year. Plans are in the works to go national after that.
And, of course, cable companies like Rogers and Shaw and telephone companies like Telus and Bell Canada are increasing their base of high-speed Internet subscribers.
It's all part of what Fortune magazine calls the Trillion Dollar Gamble, a wave of Internet infrastructure investment that is sweeping across North America.
Businesses are betting that a consumer appetite for radio-quality audio and television-quality video over the Internet will spur the demand for faster service.
"It will be a matter of who can expand their bandwidth at the lower cost and get to the markets as quickly as possible," says David Parkes, Look's president.
A study released this month by Convergence Consulting Group Ltd. of Toronto estimates more than one million Canadian households will have some form of high-speed Web access by the end of the year.
That's expected to double to two million by the end of 2001, when Convergence expects the number of Canadian households with slower dial-up Internet access is expected to peak at 3.5 million.
All this raises the question, does the average Web surfer really need the speed?
Perhaps not, if the Internet is just used for e-mail or visiting Web pages with text and still pictures. Even audio can handled by a regular phone line and a 56.6K modem that's considered basic equipment for a personal computer,
But once video is involved, dial-up Internet services just can't download fast enough to be practical.
Steven McCartney, chief executive of Futureway Communications, the company installing fibre-optic cable in housing developments just outside Toronto, says faster Internet service will be needed as demand for video content grows.
"It's there today," says McCartney. "You can watch news broadcasts from just about anywhere. But the quality is reasonably poor. The pictures are jerky. Sometimes it's too grainy to watch."
Those problems are caused by the slow speed of the Internet pipeline delivering the content, he says. To get TV-quality video, the network has to push through four million bits of data per second. If a second person in the home is watching another video stream, the capacity has to double.
That's why Futureway thinks there will be a demand for fibre optics capable of carrying 10 megabits per second.
"And I guess a whole lot of people are going to invent a whole lot more content, and we consider it our job to deliver that content," McCartney says.
One of those content providers is WorkdayTV.com, a six-month-old venture backed by Garth Turner, a former federal cabinet minister who returned to business writing and broadcasting after leaving politics.
Unlike broadcasters like CTV and CBC, which repackage their television content and put it on their Web sites, WorkdayTV produces its programming exclusively for the Internet.
"I have no doubt that the future of the Internet is video-based, not text-based," Turner says.
He admits the picture quality is poor for the kinds of dial-up Internet that's mostly commonly used by Canadians. But he expects that to change.
"I think in the next six to 18 months we well see the balance tip, so that the majority of Canadians will have high-speed access."
But even the fastest Internet connection into the home or business may not guarantee the content gets through at maximum speeds, no matter what kind of pipeline is in place, warns Ian Angus, of Angus Telemanagement Group in Ajax, Ont.
"It tries to get through, but if the network is busy it will be slower," Angus says. "The possibility is always there that the thing will slow down." |
