cedmagazine.com
"AIMING FOR EYEBALLS" by Fred Dawson
... part II
"Everybody is going to have a last-mile solution of some kind, but not
everyone is going to have an end-to-end managed broadband
infrastructure," Medin says.
Along with expanding the data rate over the trunk lines, Excite@Home
is implementing Cisco Systems, Inc.'s Dynamic Packet Technology in
routers to directly insert packets into the fiber in OC-12 (622 Mbps)
Sonet configuration, enabling 50-millisecond protection switching over
the fiber rings, Medin says. "This allows us to do a level of protection
against traffic disruption that we've never had before," he adds.
Servers in the regional data centers are also a key point of attack in the
expansion agenda, Medin notes. "We have terabytes of server capacity
currently installed, and we're going to need tons more within the next
year," he says.
Excite@Home is also working with its server
supplier, Sun Microsystems Inc., to
develop better means of protecting against
failures. Where today, the servers employ a
simple A/B switch to connect to backup CPUs
(central processing units), Excite@Home
wants to go to "n-way" clusters where four, five
or six servers are interconnected to
provide backup to each other instantaneously, Medin says.
All of this will provide Excite@Home an opportunity to deliver
broadband content, no matter what its source, to DSL and cable
customers alike at higher levels of quality than they could get
elsewhere, officials say. That, in turn, will draw people through the
Excite portal on the DSL side as a more reliable source of broadband
content than can be found going through other portals.
None of this means that Excite@Home is laying any less stress on
nurturing growth in its cable base than before, notes Adam Grosser,
president for subscriber networks for Excite@Home. In fact, he says,
the company is instituting several new plans aimed at pushing
subscriber growth faster in cable.
"We're focused on enhancing customer experiences through a series of
initiatives, including ways of moving the market to self-installation and
faster growth,"Grosser says. "We expect to see 15 to 20 percent of our
new customers performing self installation in 2000, and are planning on
hitting 80 percent in 2001."
Excite@Home is promoting self-installation via several measures,
including introduction of an online service registration capability and
release of a self-installing version of its client software, @Home 1.7.
The new software adds two new plug-ins, the VeonPlayer and
MetaStream, to support improved video and multimedia performance
over the service and provides a "reset tool" or software agent that
automatically resolves common problems experienced by users.
Further boosting the self-installation process, technically
unsophisticated users who have recent vintage PCs that come with
Universal Serial Bus ports can automatically configure USB-compatible
modems and complete the online authorization process themselves,
Medin says. "We do USB installs better than anybody else," he adds.
Excite@Home also thinks it has come up with a winning plan for
overcoming another bottleneck to installation, which is the need to add
cable outlets to connect PCs and other appliances to the network. Medin
says the company is about to announce an affiliation with a provider of
wireless home LAN technology, where it would purchase such LAN
systems in volume to bring costs down, allowing the cable affiliate to
offer the LAN at a low price or as part of the service package.
"Seventy-five to 80 percent of the rooms people have their PCs in don't
have cable outlets, which means operators have to send out an installer
to make the connection," Medin says. "If we can offer this option to the
cable operator at the price of a truck roll, we might go a long way
toward speeding up the pace of service penetration."
"We'd like to have this option in the marketplace by the third quarter,"
Medin adds, noting that he wants a system that operates at least at 10
Mbps and preferably at higher data rates. "We're looking at proprietary
systems and at systems that are designed to the (IEEE) 802.11 standard.
The 802.11 systems presently are spec'd to operate at 2 Mbps, but there
is a second version coming out next year that will operate at 10 Mbps,
notes Wendy Lee, a marketing executive at Cisco. Cisco recently
participated in a demonstration of home LAN technology with
Excite@Home and Sharewave Inc., a supplier of a proprietary system.
"We believe 802.11 will be the first wave into the home," Lee says.
"It's rapidly getting to the level where it will be available on a mass
market basis."
Clearly, with about a million subscribers now taking its cable service
in North America, the Excite@Home management team believes it has
devised a cable growth strategy that will keep it in the lead among
providers of high-speed data services, in or out of cable. Whether it
maintains that lead will depend a lot on Road Runner's success at
creating content so hot that people have to have it, no matter what else
is going on in broadband content.
Supplying such content is a tall order, and it's one that underscores
cable's risk in depending too heavily on proprietary content, especially
as Web-based broadband content moves to the TV set, as it inevitably
will. "We're doing a lot of work with Road Runner, but we don't
necessarily see things the way some people in cable do," says Dan
Miller, founder and CEO of On2.com Inc., a supplier of compression
and streaming technology.
On2 and a number of competitors are touting new versions of their
streaming systems that deliver VHS-quality full-screen video at speeds
in the hundreds of kilobits per second. On2, for example, was running
full-screen, very high-quality, fast-action motion picture segments at
300 kbps in a recent demonstration that brought signals in over an
ADSL link from an ISP that was not benefiting from any special
backbone connection.
"If you look at what we can do under these circumstances at
300 kbps, you have to realize that it's only a matter of time
before people have access to amazing content over DSL lines
connected to set-top boxes," Miller says. "Cable can't afford
not to let its subscribers have access to that content as well.
Indeed, when it comes to delivering Web-based broadband content,
the television set could well be as large, if not a larger factor than
the PC in driving penetration into the mass market. Barriers to
getting DSL delivered into the TV sets will soon vanish with delivery
of DSL set-tops to retail shelves next year, Miller notes.
"Does the cable operator provide a box that doesn't get you access to all
that content the DSL box owner can get?," Miller asks. "I don't think
so."
As if to underscore the point, at the same event where On2
demonstrated its technology, namely, the Streaming Media West
conference in San Jose last month, another purveyor was showing the
world's first instance of a full-length feature film, video-on-demand
service offered over the Web. The provider, MeTV.com, was using the
same DSL links to deliver a 375 kbps full-screen VOD service that
offers 1,500 titles to users on demand.
"We're just getting started, but we've already registered 20,000 users,"
says Jeffrey Pescatello, president and CEO of MeTV. Finding backbone
support to ensure delivery of first-class service is not a problem, he
adds, noting that his company has distribution contracts with several
providers of high-speed backbone feeds via satellite and terrestrial
links to ISP points of presence.
"Once I have the contract with the backbone distribution supplier, I
don't have to worry whether there's a special arrangement with the local
ISP," Pescatello says. "When you type in our URL, the system
automatically takes you to the cache site of whichever of our backbone
suppliers is closest to the ISP POP (point of presence).
Nor is getting the signal to the TV much of a problem. MeTV has just
filed for a patent on a device which it will soon offer for about $100 to
consumers who want to watch MeTV movies on TV sets. The little box,
measuring a couple of inches on all sides, plugs into the A/V inputs on
the backs of most recent vintage TVs and transcodes the IP to NTSC.
The signal is delivered from an online-connected PC to the box at the
TV via a wireless link operating in the unlicensed band at 5.4 GHz.
"We can go over cable data modems or DSL, and we bypass the
set-top," Pescatello says. "So this is something anybody with a
high-speed link can get."
----end |
