Pat Lookslike MFS has PLANS Too
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December 16, 1996, Issue: 610
Section: Top Of The Week
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High-Speed Local Access Nears Rollout -- MFS seeks to get jump on Bells
By Mary E. Thyfault with Hakhi Alakhun El
Broadband communications is coming soon to remote offices nationwide. MFS Communications Inc. and its Internet subsidiary, UUnet Technologies Inc., last week announced plans to bring much-awaited Digital Subscriber Line high-speed local access services to 45 cities starting in early 1997.
The service, the first of many DSL offerings to be rolled out in the United States in 1997, will operate over ordinary copper phone lines at 768 Kbps. The Bells and other local phone companies also plan 1997 rollouts of the technology, which is not only faster than ISDN, with a top speed of 6 Mbps, but is also much easier for carriers to implement.
Competitive access and Internet providers will jump-start the market ahead of the Bells and other conventional carriers, says Daniel Briere, president of TeleChoice Inc., a consulting firm in Verona, N.J. CADVision, an Internet provider in Calgary, Alberta, plans to bring up 20,000 lines of 2.5-Mbps service in two weeks, at a cost of $53 per month.
Still, some of the former monopolies are moving fast, planning their own commercial DSL services for the first quarter. GTE and US West have been testing the technology with employees and customers since the spring. GTE and Microsoft, which just completed a test in Irving, Texas, are launching a test in Redmond and Kirkland, Wash., with about 100 businesses.
Users who have tested DSL services say more local bandwidth means higher productivity. "It's improving the efficiency of our organization when Web pages pop up on the screen and we're not waiting for them to download," says John Abbott, president of Turnaround Computing, a Web application developer that uses GTE's service in its Plano, Texas, office.
Carriers are planning to sell DSL services for about $40 to $100 a month. That compares to ISDN's average rate of about $50.
Abbott is testing Asymmetrical DSL, which offers a 1.5-Mbps channel for downstream data traffic and a 64-Kbps upstream channel. MFS/UUnet is deploying Single High Bit Rate DSL, at 768 Kbps in both directions.
Cable TV companies are moving in with their own high-speed data services, aimed at telecommuters. Cox Communications Inc. in Atlanta last week announced plans to distribute 50,000 Motorola cable modems in 1997 to subscribers in Phoenix, San Diego, and Omaha, Neb., letting them download data at 10 Mbps over Cox's hybrid fiber-coaxial network.
Copyright r 1996 CMP Media Inc.
You can reach this article directly:
techweb.com
HB
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Access to the ExtraLink service is via MFS local circuits, between 1.544 megabits per second and 45 Mbps, the company representatives said.
ExtraLink Remote lets remote users connect to corporate data via dial-up access using Uunet's dial-up infrastructure, which includes 845 points of presence worldwide, and supports access between 14.4-Kbps dial-up and 128-Kbps ISDN, the companies' spokesmen said.
Rates for ExtraLink start at $1,713 a month for 1.544-Mbps access and go up to $18,900 a month for 45-Mbps access. Rates for ExtraLink Remote are $3 an hour for local access and $9 an hour for international or "800'' access, with a $1,000-a-month minimum. |
