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Technology Stocks : InfoSpace (INSP): Where GNET went! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: PatrickMark who wrote (12726)	10/9/1999 9:48:00 PM
From: Roger Sherman	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 28311

Oh..oh!!! We Got Trouble Right Here in River City! From today's Seattle Times: seattletimes.com Posted at 09:05 p.m. PDT; Saturday, October 9, 1999 SHOPPERS TAKE CABLE MODEMS OUT FOR A HIGH-SPEED TEST DRIVE by Peter Lewis Seattle Times technology reporter Bits were moving a lot faster than new subscribers yesterday during the start of a traveling road show billed as the Cable Internet Revolution Expo. The show is part of a 20-city, high-traffic, shopping-mall tour that started in June and continues at Northgate Mall today and tomorrow. Relatively small crowds were drawn to the demonstration of cable-modem technology - the high-speed Internet access AT&T cable service (formerly TCI) offers in parts of its service area. In fact, there were times when salespeople outnumbered potential customers. But those who stopped to check out the free show seemed generally impressed by blazing download speeds - advertised as 100 times faster than the conventional 28.8 kilobits per second (28.8k) dial-up modems. Whether data truly achieved that speed is impossible to say, but clearly they moved a lot faster than most folks were used to. "This is astonishing," said Herman Moore, 16. A video file that he said would take him 10 minutes to download on his computer with a 56K modem at home was playing on the cable-modem machine in a matter of seconds. "I love this speed," said Moore, who lives with his family in Fremont. "I'm going to talk to my father about it (getting hooked up)." One who did sign up, Eric Sartoris, said he had been weighing whether to go with the telephone companies' high-speed alternative, the digital subscriber line (DSL), or a cable modem for some time. "It was a tough choice," he said. "Nobody I know wants to deal with TCI or US West." What finally swung him to cable modem, he said, was that he is a Macintosh user, which US West told him presented problems for the type of DSL he wanted; that cable modem has a higher maximum speed than DSL; and that it was a risk-free proposition, because AT&T@Home, the AT&T unit that delivers the service, was offering free installation in addition to waiving the first month's charges (about $40). To top it off, US West told him he would have to wait until the end of November, and he was tiring of topping out at 24.6k when he connected to the Internet with his current equipment, Sartoris said. AT&T@Home currently has about 1 million customers in the U.S., compared with about 200,000 DSL customers, analysts say. But those two types of service, together with other high-speed Internet-access technologies, represent less than 7 percent of online households, according to figures from New York-based Jupiter Communications, a technology research company. Jupiter projects that segment will grow to nearly 24 percent by 2003. AT&T expects the crowds at Northgate to help reach that goal. Eric Hudson, the demo's lead salesman, said Saturdays are typically the expo's busiest day. Copyright ¸ 1999 The Seattle Times Company