Company (AMUT) Promises Cheap Bandwidth For Home
Techweb Technology News: techweb.com
(04/07/98; 4:55 p.m. EST)
By John Borland, Net Insider
A small San Francisco Bay Area company unveiled its version of a digital Net access technology Tuesday it said can provide high-bandwidth home connections cheaper than ISDN or other competing digital technologies.
American Multiplexer Corp. (AMC) said its DigiCop system uses existing telephone infrastructure to provide home Net users with data rates up to five times faster than traditional modems.
"This is an easy migration to high bandwidth," said AMC president Edward Tan. "We want to be able to hit the consumer and allow them to access the Net at high speeds. "
The DigiCop box digitizes voice traffic and routes data traffic. Once installed in the home between the inside lines and the outside network, the system will let a PC be plugged directly into the home phone jack, and can be set to handle between 64 kilobits and 256 Kbits of data traffic. Users can have a continuous Net connection while also using their voice line with the technology, company officials said.
The system uses symmetrical digital subscriber loop (SDSL) technology, allowing it to use the existing copper lines.
Company officials said they expected telephone companies to sell the service to customers for between $20 and $30 a month. They did not say what the DigiCop equipment would cost for the companies themselves, but said the estimated subscriber price would let telephone companies recover their investment in about three years.
Other companies are already offering similar SDSL technologies, but not at the price quoted by AMC. Uunet offers a 728-kilobit-per-second service in New York and some California cities that costs $150 to $250 per month, and requires the customer to buy the $400 equipment package.
Other phone and Net access companies offer ISDN, which runs at 64 Kbps. A consortium of telephony and high-tech companies also are working to produce a different digital DSL standard that would provide much higher data-transmission rates, but would require considerably more infrastructure investment from phone companies.
"The cost of ISDN is extremely huge from the point of view of existing infrastructure," Tan said. "On one hand, we have all the digitization features ISDN has, but we don't have the cost."
Although the technology does sound promising, AMC has considerable work to do to break into a market dominated by bigger companies, said VisionQuest 2000 analyst Duane Smith. "A lot of companies are on the verge of such things," he said. "But one would have to wonder about their ability to conform with emerging standards."
Smith said he predicted the market for high-speed consumer access is huge, ranging from billions of dollars for equipment manufactures and possibly tens of billions for ISPs. But this means big players such as Lucent Technologies, Cisco, Rockwell Semiconductor, and others will move into the space, and have a disproportionate effect on the standards determination, he said. A smaller company like AMC will likely find itself at a disadvantage in this process, he said.
AMC officials said their technology could fill an immediate market gap while standards are being developed, however. Since the DigiCop system is relatively inexpensive, without the pricy infrastructure investments needed for the asymmetrical DSL, the phone companies "have nothing to lose in adopting this standard," Tan said. ISPs do not have to install any additional technology to receive the high-bandwidth signal, he added.
The DigiCop system would be ready for shipment to phone companies in about three months, Tan said. |
