RCN<--->AOL : Strange bedfellows?
AOL's Case Urges Cable Industry to Open Access on Its Networks
San Francisco, Feb. 17 (Bloomberg) -- America Online Inc.
Chief Executive Steve Case urged the cable industry to open
access to its cable-television network to Internet service
providers and preserve consumer choice in the fledgling market.
''Consumer choice could be maintained if the cable industry
resells its broadband network to ISPs just as the phone companies
do now in the narrow-band world,'' Case said, speaking at a San
Francisco meeting of the Commonwealth Club of California.
AOL, the No. 1 online service, has been lobbying federal
policymakers to open cable-television networks to competition so
more companies can use them to deliver high-speed Internet
access. AOL and other Internet service providers want unfettered
access to these connections as more consumers move to so-called
broadband service, which is as much as 100 times faster than
traditional online service through dial-up telephone lines.
Last month, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission
signaled that it won't require cable operators to share their new
high-speed Internet hookups with competitors anytime soon.
Cable companies and their affiliates such as At Home Corp.,
whose biggest shareholder is Tele-Communications Inc., say
they've always given consumers the ability to choose their online
service on top of the service the cable companies offer.
Case said that's not good enough.''The cable industry's message to consumers is pretty simple: If you want high-speed Internet access over cable lines, you must buy the Internet service we own before you can buy the internet service of your choice,'' Case said.
''In this cable industry model, any other service provider
would be classified as a premium service and would be available
to their consumers at an extra cost,'' he said. ''That, we think,
would be bad for consumers, bad for the medium, and bad for
business investment and innovation.''
He urged cable operators to consider alternatives. If the
companies open their cable-TV networks to ISPs such as AOL, he
said, they ''will attract new investments, earn a faster return
on investments and by most measures, get an even larger return as
narrow-band customers upgrade more rapidly to take advantage of
the possibilities of broadband access.''
Dulles, Virginia-based AOL fell 6 1/2 to 153. |
