PacBel unleshaes DSL service, Part II
The technology will not work on phone lines more than about 2 1/2 miles from a Pac Bell central
office, said Paula Reinman, Pac Bell's marketing director for DSL service. The lines also have to be
free of signal-processing equipment, such as the load coils used to amplify voices, Reinman said.
Pac Bell estimates that 65 percent of the customers in the areas selected for the FasTrack DSL
launch will be able to sign up for the service. Those areas are parts of Danville, San Ramon, San
Jose, Burlingame, Los Altos, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Redwood City, Santa Clara and
Sunnyvale. Residents of these cities can call Pac Bell to find out if their phone lines can support the
new service.
So far, TCI and its high-speed Internet affiliate, @Home Corp., have launched their cable-modem
service only in Fremont and parts of Sunnyvale. But Andrew Johnson, a TCI spokesman, said, ''I
think you will see an aggressive deployment of the @Home product (in the Bay Area) between
now and the end of the year.''
Before TCI and @Home can begin service in a community, TCI has to upgrade its network to
provide a two-way path shielded from electronic interference -- no small task. By contrast, Pac
Bell can offer DSL service over its existing wires.
Although the theoretical top speed of @Home's service is up to three times faster than Pac Bell's
DSL service, in practice the speed can decline as more users sign on.
The Pac Bell DSL service will initially be available in two speeds: 384 kilobits per second (Kbps)
when subscribers send or receive data, or 1.5 megabits per second (Mbps) when receiving and 384
Kbps when sending. The maximum speed depends on the subscriber's distance from a Pac Bell
central office. Those rates are seven to 27 times as fast as a conventional modem's rates.
Pac Bell's fees will range from $80 to $250 per month, plus installation fees. Customers using the
service to connect to the Internet rather than a corporate network will also have to pay $95 per
month to Concentric Network Corp. of Cupertino, the only Internet service provider offering the
service at this point.
Installation will take about 10 days, Reinman said, adding that Pac Bell had set up a special team
to handle orders.
The DSL technology is several years old, yet it has been slow to reach the market despite the
growing demand for higher-speed access to the Internet. Several companies across the country,
including one in Laguna Beach, have been offering DSL service over the copper lines that phone
companies lease to burglar-alarm monitoring companies, but Pac Bell has not allowed that tactic
in its territory, said Russ Teasdale of InterNex Information Services Inc., a Santa Clara Internet
service provider.
Nevertheless, Teasdale said, at least two entrepreneurial phone companies are preparing to jump
into the DSL business in competition with Pac Bell. |
