Why I love COVD..............Northpoint Moves Up In DSL Races
Filed at 8:54 p.m. EDT
By Jason P. McKay for tele.com, CMPnet
As providers of DSL race to become the
broadband connection of choice for consumers
and small- to medium-sized businesses across the
United States, two major players have
announced yet another agreement to speed the
services to market.
NorthPoint Communications Holdings, in San
Francisco, has received a $4.9 million investment
and entered into a strategic alliance with Frontier
Communications, subsidiary of Frontier in Rochester, N.Y. to provide
Frontier with high-speed DSL local Internet access connections for
small- to medium-sized business customers in various metropolitan
markets.
Frontier said it plans to roll out these new services beginning around the
third quarter of this year in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington,
D.C., and New York, with 24 other U.S. markets to follow.
NorthPoint, a data CLEC, is expected to go public in an initial stock
offering next month, and appears to be moving full speed ahead in the
DSL arena. This move comes fresh off the heels of a recent deal with
Verio, in Englewood, Colo., in which Verio increased its investment in
NorthPoint to $10 million as both companies are getting set to expand
their co-branded DSL offerings to 21 U.S. cities.
A Northpoint spokeswoman declined to comment on the implications of
the two deals for the company.
With the recent multitude of DSL offerings popping up like wildfire, some
analysts say the race for broadband connection dollars is in full swing.
"Our research shows that there is tremendous pent up demand for this,"
said Robert Rosenberg, president, Insight Research, in Parsippany, N.J.
"In a market where the cable companies and the telephone companies
both want to provision high-speed service, the race is to the fleet. The
one that gets there first gets the customer."
Under terms of the Frontier investment, which were made by
Frontier'srecently formed Frontier Internet Ventures, NorthPoint is to
become Frontier's principal provider of DSL.
Frontier declined to give definitive pricing plans, but said that DSL
connections bundled with Net access will start at approximately $125
per month for around 160 kilobits per second connection and about
$500 per month for a T-1 connection.
Frontier is excited that it will now further increase its footprint to reach
out and touch the small- to medium-sized businesses via the Internet, said
Jon Russo, vice president of Internet product management at Frontier.
With these new offerings Frontier can look to provide its customers with
faster access to data on the Net. "Behind the scenes we have eight media
distribution centers that house the content that everyone's trying to get to
on the Internet," said Russo.
(c) 1999 CMP Media Inc.
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