Ma Bell cable
Not your mother's network
By Jeffry Bartash, CBS MarketWatch
Last Update: 7:44 PM ET Aug 24, 1999 NewsWatch
ASPEN, Colo. (CBS.MW) -- Ma Bell's man in charge of its high-speed cable and Internet business boasts that AT&T's move to make the network capable of handling voice calls and high-speed Web access is "the most formidable execution in the history of this country."
Over the next four years, Leo Hindery Jr. says, AT&T (T: news, msgs) will have to spend 50 million hours of labor on installation of its ambitious, all-encompassing telecommunications network, which will offer local, long-distance, data, TV and high-speed Internet service. He said most of the network should be in place by mid-2001.
"When I think of this, I just go, 'wow!' " he said at the Progress & Freedom Foundation's technology summit in Aspen, Colo., on Tuesday. See Renegade Report.
Noting that TVs are in almost every home in America, while computers penetrate only about half of all households, Hindery declared that AT&T is "trying to turn the TV into the primary Internet access point instead of the PC."
"This is not your mother's cable industry anymore," Hindery said.
Hindery also indicated that AT&T is not opposed to eventual open access for its high-speed cable lines, a condition that rival local Bell phone carriers legally now must labor under. He emphasized, however, that the cable high-speed industry is "in its infancy" and that his company has fewer than 100,000 broadband customers. "All I am saying is now is not the time."
AT&T, which owns a large stake in leading cable high-speed service provider ExciteAtHome (ATHM: news, msgs), is obligated by contract to exclusively offer than service over its network for the next few years.
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