INTERVIEW-Nortel Internet access sales to surge
Reuters Story - March 18, 1998 20:12
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By Neal Boudette
HANOVER, Germany, March 18 (Reuters) - Northern Telecom
Ltd said on Wednesday that demand for faster
connections to the Internet would roughly triple its sales of
access products from less than $300 million to more than $1
billion in the next few years.
"I think you're going to see an enormous surge in this
area," Ian Craig, president of NorTel's broadband networks
division, told Reuters in an interview at the CeBIT trade fair.
"I think our sales will be over $1 billion in a few of years."
Access products include modems, ISDN (integrated services
digital networks) cards and other devices that enable computers
to send and receive data via the Internet or telephone
networks.
Most of the surge would come from products under
development that have the potential to deliver much faster
access than the modems available for personal computers today,
Craig said after at a news conference.
"There are about 75 million people on the Internet today
and we think it will go to 250 million by 2000," said Craig.
"There's going to be huge demand for faster access."
Nortel's most promising access products include a modem
that can send data at a rate of one megabit per second and a
device that can use electric power lines to send data at
similar speeds, Craig said.
The one-megabit modem can send data over standard copper
wires up to 10 or more times faster than modems based on ISDN,
which was seen as highly promising in the 1980s, Craig said.
An Internet access provider in Chicago recently began
offering Nortel's one megabit modem to its subscribers and
another in New York is planning to do the same later this year,
Craig said. Some large telephone companies were also
considering using the technology.
The powerline device offers similar speeds and is used in a
pilot programme by an electric company in Britain. Germany's
largest power supplier, RWE AG has also conducted
trials, Craig said.
"It will cost about the same as an ISDN modem, but will be
10 times faster," he said.
The one-megabit modem requires minimal changes to the
telephone company's or Internet access provider's network. For
the powerline device, electric companies must install switches
that connect their electric cables to high-speed phone lines.
Nortel is also working on a another technology called ADSL
(asynchronous digital subscriber line) that is also several
times faster than ISDN.
Craig said Nortel thinks several types of high-speed access
technologies will be successful.
"We don't think any one technology is going to satisfy
demand," he said.
He also said ISDN, which is widely available in Germany and
certain other countries, would probably lose out to ADSL and
the others in the next decade.
"People will continue to use ISDN, but ultimately these
(existing) technologies will get swept away," he added. |
