"Cable clearly, at minimum, has a five-to-one lead," said Michael Harris, president of Kinetic Strategies Inc. He estimated that DSL modems are in no more than 200,000 homes so far.
They also come as the phone companies, alarmed by the growing popularity of cable modems, belatedly step up the pace of DSL rollouts in their major markets.
Late last month, for instance, Bell Atlantic Corp. announced that it will double the pace of its DSL deployment, while GTE Corp. became the fourth regional phone company to agree to carry AOL Plus on its DSL lines.
"There's a lot of competition in the DSL market and a lot of promotion," said Cynthia Brumfield, principal analyst at Broadband Intelligence Inc. "There's a real big, aggressive push on DSL."
PacBell is also offering a special deal, with free installation and $49 a month for 384K X 128K service, including the ISP, plus a one-time $198 equipment fee:
pacbell.com
pacbell.com
You have to sign up for a year to get the free install though, and I can't get it in my neighborhood, because Pac Bell agreed with the PUC not to cross over into GTE territory. |
