[ISPs Drive ADSL Ahead] It's still early folks...
(03/17/97; 6:00 p.m. EST)
By Jeff Caruso, CommunicationsWeek
Internet business users in dozens of cities soon will have a new set of high-speed options to get to the Net. But what could be a bargain in one part of the country could prove an exorbitant deal in another.
That's because no two service providers offering these new ADSL-based services will have the same price or even the same pricing structure. Speeds and options vary considerably, and because ADSL speeds are variable, comparisons with established services like T1 or ISDN are difficult to make.
For instance, among the first Internet service providers to offer commercial ADSL services is Signet Partners Inc., Austin, Texas. It introduced Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line services in Austin last month and plans to expand to Houston and San Antonio by June.
Signet resells voice-grade copper lines it buys for $20 a month each from the local telephone company. The lines terminate at a Signet point of presence, and the ISP attaches ADSL routers from Netspeed Inc., also in Austin, at both ends of the line. The customer can buy the router, or pay Signet to provide and manage the router for them.
The ADSL services are priced starting at $595 a month for 640-kilobits-per-second access from the Internet to the user and 272 Kbps from the user to the Net. That compares with $375 a month for 128-Kbps ISDN access each way, and $1,495 a month for unlimited 1.54-megabits-per-second T1 access; bursty T1 access is $995. A comparable ADSL offering provides an unlimited 1.6 Mbps to the user and a 680 Kbps return channel for $995 a month.
That's a far cry from InterAccess Co., a Chicago ISP; it charges $180 a month for ADSL service providing 1.5-Mbps downstream and 64-Kbps upstream. It has added a $190 service for 784 Kbps in both directions. But those rates for one PC only; each additional IP address will cost $30 a month.
At the Internet World trade show in Los Angeles last week, Uunet Technologies Inc., one of the largest ISPs with a nationwide presence, unveiled its deployment plans and prices for its Preferred Access DSL service. The Uunet service gives business customers a 128-Kbps dedicated connection to the Internet.
The service already is available in parts of Northern California and will be offered in 25 California cities within 90 days, Uunet said. By the third quarter, Preferred Access DSL should be available in nearly 120 U.S. cities. But circuit charges will vary by region ranging from $150 to $250 a month.
Established local telephone companies also will start offering new digital subscriber line (xDSL) services later this year. A GTE official said the carrier is considering a 1.5-Mbps ADSL service for $60 to $100 a month; a 4-Mbps service under consideration will cost more. Southwestern Bell is planning fourth-quarter availability for its ADSL offerings, but has yet to settle on what it will charge for the services, a company official said.
Part of the reason for the different price structures is that xDSL technology allows for a wide variety of speeds to or from a central site. During the past year, equipment vendors have blitzed carriers with a confusing and extensive array of xDSL products in an effort to see which combination of speeds and features sticks.
But in contrast to ISDN, xDSL services don't get routed through a central office switch, so neither the user nor the ISP has to deal with configuration issues that plague ISDN.
Despite its advantages, ADSL is still a brand new technology, pointed out Tim Burke, communications analyst at the Yankee Group, Boston. "There are going to be lessons to be learned," he said. "It's not a no-brainer." Things to consider include diagnostics and troubleshooting, distance limitations and line quality, he noted.
Still, the current pricing plans may come as a bit of a shock to IS managers looking for a way around the local access bottleneck. One of Signet's beta customers has been using the 2.2-Mbps service free of charge since it went online in January. When he found out how much the service would cost, nearly $1,300 a month for 2.2-Mbps access, he was skeptical.
"$1,295? Good luck!" said David Weaver, director of MIS at Austin Ventures, a venture capital firm in Texas. He added that he expects the price to drop in coming months. "It's an early price in a market where there haven't been any prices set," he said.
"I have no clue what to expect for pricing," said Lee Nolan, senior telecommunications engineer, Travelers Property Casualty Inc., Hartford, Conn. But he said pricing is not the most important issue; availability and ease of configuration and installation are factors that weigh just as heavily. And he'd like to see a consistent nationwide offering unlike ISDN, which carriers implemented differently, creating minor but niggling incompatibilities between different regions of the country.
The question of whether users can really take advantage of the higher access speeds also has yet to be answered. Weaver said he never uses the full 2.2 Mbps his Internet connection can reach. He upgraded from ISDN to speed up large file transfers, but the fastest sustained data rate reached during transfers is about 250 Kbps.
By implementing ADSL, Weaver eliminated a barrier between user and provider, but other bottlenecks in the Net stop the link from being fully utilized.
"It's that Internet happy hour between 3 and 5 in the afternoon" that really congests the network, Weaver said. <Picture: end>
--John Rendleman contributed to this story. |
