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To: DiViT who wrote (44100)	8/23/1999 7:38:00 PM
From: John Rieman	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 50808

mPhase working with Telcos to send MPEG-2 over twisted pairs.............................. pcworld.com Not Your Parents' Phone Company DSL set-top box squeezes 400 TV channels, phone calls, and Web access onto a regular phone line. by David Essex, special to PC World August 19, 1999, 5:18 p.m. PT Could you possibly get TV and the Web transmitted through your phone line? Consumers in Hartwell, Georgia are participating in a pilot study of a new technology that lets them do just that. Called the Traverser Digital Video and Data Delivery System, the set-top box, made by mPhase Technologies, is the newest weapon in the telephone companies' fight with cable operators to provide a single information pipeline into homes and small businesses. It is expected to become commercially available to customers of Hartwell's Hart Telephone by year's end, and nationally in early 2000, if other telephone companies adopt it. A Traverser hookup will cost about the same as separate telephone/Internet and cable TV lines do, says Susan Cifelli, mPhase's executive vice president of marketing. Internet speeds will be comparable to current broadband offerings, at a maximum of 6.272 megabits per second downstream and 1 mbps upstream. Consumers will likely rent the box rather than own it, and they'll be able to control the amount of bandwidth allocated to voice, data, and TV. Telephone companies will get up to 400 TV channels from content providers' satellites as cable companies do, but viewers will have more control of the channels they receive, Cifelli claims. Gaining Ground on Cable Companies Few analysts outside the financial community have been briefed on the Traverser. But one analyst who follows the broadband market says if mPhase's claims are true, the product will be a large factor in the telephone companies' ability to quickly compete in the broadband market. "If they really are focusing on video, that would be an expansion of the capability," says Jeanette Noyes, a telecommunications analyst at International Data Corporation. Telephone companies have been struggling for years to improve transmission speeds on their networks, in part by stringing expensive fiber optic cable. The problem is that the lines leading into homes are typically older copper wires that can't easily provide the speed required for video and broadband Internet. Efforts have focused on Digital Subscriber Line modems like the Traverser, which uses Rate-Adaptive DSL to adjust for the varying quality of copper wiring. A competing technology, Very High-Rate DSL, is behind a similar pilot that US West is conducting in the Phoenix area. "It took two years to figure out how to do TV via copper," Cifelli says. "No one else is doing it now." But Noyes cautions, "We're still in the early phases of getting the technology perfected," and standardization issues cloud the overall DSL outlook.