Broadband Internet: How Broadly? How Soon?
By SETH SCHIESEL
January 17, 2000
It was eight years ago that John C. Malone, the cable television baron, brashly proclaimed that the average American home would soon be able to receive 500 channels of information and entertainment. But since then, the arrival of two-way, high-capacity, high-speed services has been next year's story.
Like some mythical wild beast that is described but never seen, broadband -- as such high-speed links are known -- has always been out there somewhere, just over the horizon. Next year, the analysts and executives promised, next year.
Five-hundred-channel cable systems have not materialized, because Malone's original vision is still too far ahead of the technology -- and more importantly, because the rise of the Internet overtook plans for other types of interactive TV.
But now, broadband information and entertainment pipelines are finally reaching at least some American homes. And by agreeing last week to acquire Time Warner, America Online, the leading Internet access provider, is betting $165 billion that, at long last, next year is actually this year.
In that view, and on that big bet, America Online is not alone.
The converging Internet, cable TV and telephone industries are spending billions of dollars to make broadband a reality -- at an estimated construction cost of $500 to $600 a household, whether the broadband connection is through a cable system or telephone line. The effort represents the most extensive, most expensive engineering project in residential communications since the cable TV industry started wiring neighborhoods in the 1960s.
Around the nation, residential streets are being torn up for new fiber-optic cables. Technicians are testing telephone lines to ensure compatibility with advanced new technology. Already, some 1.4 million American homes now enjoy broadband on-ramps to what was once quaintly referred to as the information highway. And by the end of this year, a large plurality of the roughly 100 million households in the United States will probably have access to some sort of high-speed data connection.
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