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To: GraceZ who wrote (11435)	6/17/1999 9:41:00 PM
From: red_dog	Respond to of 29970

From the East back to reality. Cable's God-given Pipe June 17, 1999 Open up the cable network, I dare you. Back in 1992, the FCC tried to make cable companies lower their rates. After a few years of high-pitched whining, the cable companies whittled down "basic cable" to include MTV and the Sphincter Channel, pushing all the 500 channels you wanted onto pricey "a la carte" menus. Now there's some governmental brawn for you. Then the cable industry tried to get a little discipline on the service side, promising it would offer $20 to customers inconvenienced by tardy cable repair crews. They might as well have been airbrushing photos of a plane wreck. Consumers became slightly less annoyed at service, while still pissed off that almost all markets have a single cable provider. Now, just as cable is looking at an alternate revenue source in Internet access (which, by the way, fires up cable moguls more than the Romance Channel), AOL and GTE are trying to prove they can jerry-rig cable networks easily for access by alternate ISPs. You think Michael Armstrong slapped a ring on TCI's chubby fingers so AOL could flip a switch and get a cable-modem quickie? Fat chance. FCC Chief William Kennard is scrambling to deal with the issue, brought to a head by a bunch of plucky local-government types in Portland, Ore., who want any ISP to offer them Internet access over cable modems. Forget the @Home Network, these companies want to consider AT&T's network a god-given pipe. Like Pacific Bell's local connection, why shouldn't AT&T's equipment be ours? Let me count the ways. First, let me say that I fully understand that cable companies aren't angels. Their networks are old. It's hard to get what you want, and you're always hearing about someone who lives 50 miles from you who has the wonderful access they need. Next, though, I'll add that they weren't created through the privatization of a government-born, -bred and -fattened enterprise. You say the Bells' local access has to be opened up, well, let's get cable in the same swipe. Not so fast. TCI and Time Warner snapped up their networks through acquisitions of well "clustered" systems. They weren't created out of the 1984 Ma Bell break up. You'd be stretching it to say they are public property--unless you surmise that the American public paid for the pipes through the aftermath of the junk bond bailout, in that junk bonds served as one good way to finance cable expansion in the late '70s and early '80s. Call me the bad guy if you want. If you want to charge cable companies with anti-competitive monopoly behavior, that's one thing. But asking them to open up their networks ... call me a corporate stool pigeon, but why should they? I suppose local governments gave cable companies right of way and thereby the privilege of ripping up our sidewalks or erecting poles so they could string the physical wires along. Should satellites be forced to open up space for competitors because they fly through the public air? Same would go for wireless networks, I guess. If the FCC wants to do this to stretch its atrophying wings, I suppose it can try. But beyond the "why" question is the "how" question. Look how well the Bells have responded to telecom deregulation--with reticence and sluggishness. Imagine the putrid attitude cable would emanate. It's a dirty job, but does somebody have to do it? Tish Williams is senior writer/editor at UPSIDE.

To: GraceZ who wrote (11435)	6/17/1999 9:51:00 PM
From: red_dog	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 29970

Here's a pretty good article, from bank of Boston (East) @Home's Physical Network is Built for Speed and is a Valuable Asset. With the state of the Internet today, the largest bottleneck for fast access, once a broadband service has been installed, is the “last mile” to the household. A consumer switching from 56k modem to a cable connection would notice a large difference in the experience. However, that by itself is a half-solution; there are plenty of other bottlenecks within the Internet backbone that also slow things down. This is being addressed by backbone providers and ISPs, but will take some time to be eliminated. @Home's proprietary network should go a long way towards solving this. The current backbone provider is Sprint, but this will change in August when Excite @Home begins using a more dedicated backbone from AT&T under a 20-year contract. This backbone connects into proprietary @Home regional data centers, which in turn connect into cable head-ends for eventual delivery into households. This solution creates a proprietary “mini-Internet” with enough dedicated capacity to handle broadband traffic and minimize congestion, and its proprietary architecture enables caching and fast data transmission to help Excite @Home deliver unmatched multi-media content that could potentially overwhelm other mid- and broadband solutions like DSL. Other companies like AOL can offer a broadband connection to the home, but without a dedicated network. AOL could be additionally challenged by the fact that the majority of its traffic is routed through its server farms in Dulles, VA. Short term, with the generally text-based nature of Internet traffic as we know it today, this is not a big problem because the last mile is the biggest bottleneck. Longer term, with more television-like content, AOL and others would need the Internet's capacity to grow enough to accommodate large-scale multi-media traffic with minimal congestion. Problem of network congestion will have an even more noticeable effect on a broadband user if he is accessing a lot of broadband-purposed multimedia content. The content may actually travel slowly to the last mile, and then very quickly to the home.