Thread comments [on bold] wireless BB in Canada?...and AOL- Article
montrealgazette.com
Wednesday 17 May 2000
Rush is on to provide high-speed Net
ANDY RIGA
The Gazette
Speed rules on the Internet. It cuts the long waits associated with surfing the Web, eliminates the need for cumbersome log-ons and opens the door to actually watching video online.
To feed the need for speed, expect a series of new types of high-speed services soon from AOL Canada, Look Communications and others offering fresh competition to Bell Canada's Sympatico Internet service and cable-modem services from companies like Groupe Videotron.
It's easy to see why there's a rush to offer fast connections.
Over the next four years, the number of Canadian Internet subscribers is expected to more than triple to 10.8 million, according to market researcher Yankee Group Canada. The proportion of high-speed users will grow at an even faster clip. Yankee Group estimates high-speed customers will jump sixfold to 3.7 million.
While more new users are signing up for cheap - or even free - 56K dial-up Internet, they are expected to graduate to high-speed services that are dozens of times faster. Those services provide more profit potential for providers thanks to higher monthly fees and the prospect of E-commerce transactions.
AOL yesterday launched a three-month trial of its AOL Plus high-speed service, offering the service over the network of cable operator Regional Cablesystems in a tiny market - Sturgeon Falls, Ont., a city near North Bay.
About 100 users will test the service over three months, after which a commercial launch is planned. AOL Canada, an arm of the world's largest
Internet-service provider, is already in trials in Toronto of high-speed service using digital subscriber line modems over Bell Canada's telephone network.
As high-speed AOL users surf the Net, menus will pop up on the screen offering audio and video content, including stock-market updates from ROBTv.com, news from Global TV and sports from CBS, AOL Canada chief executive Stephen Bartkiw said in an interview yesterday.
By early 2001, AOL Canada hopes to roll out high-speed service over phone and cable networks across the country, he added. Prices haven't been determined yet, but they'll be "competitive." Bartkiw said. Phone and cable companies currently sell high-speed access for $35 to $40 a month.
AOL is already working with Bell but has complained that Canada's four big cable companies aren't offering access to their networks to other ISPs at a reasonable cost. Bartkiw said he is hoping federal regulators will pressure cable companies to lower those rates.
AOL Canada, which bills itself as easier to use and more convenient than competitors, has 180,000 customers in Canada, but Bartkiw's target is one million by 2002. He wouldn't say how many are expected to be high-speed.
Offering fast connections is key to that growth, Bartkiw said. AOL users are clamouring for fast connections because they're always on and allow richer multimedia content, he added.
AOL's announcement came a day after Look Communications - the company behind the wireless digital television service competing against cable and direct-to-home satellite - launched its first two-way wireless, high-speed Internet service. The service, whose top speed rivals that of cable and DSL services, uses a modified version of the antenna that captures TV signals. Initially only available in Toronto, it will reach Montreal within months, said Gary Kawaguchi, Look's senior vice-president (sales and marketing).
For now, Montrealers can sign up for what is described as a one-way wireless Internet service. It was launched here with little fanfare two weeks ago, and will soon be the subject of an advertising campaign.
That cheaper service uses the Look TV antenna to receive Internet content at high speeds, but still relies on your phone line to send information (E-mail, Web-site addresses and such) back to the Internet.
Look, which has signed up 34,000 TV customers since it started rolling out service in late 1998, won't say how many high-speed Internet users it has. It has 150,000 dial-up customers.
Videotron, which already has a growing legion of cable-modem high-speed customers, is preparing to launch another Internet service, likely by August, said company spokesman Jean-Paul Galarneau.
It will offer easy-to-use Internet access via the set-top boxes already being used to provide its digital-TV service.
The Internet-on-your-TV service, which would allow Web surfing, E-mail and online chatting, is aimed at digital-cable subscribers who don't have a computer but are curious about the Internet, Galarneau said. Users will be able to watch TV as they use the Internet and will input text on a wireless keyboard.
The cost will probably be about $9 per month, Galarneau said.
Some of the Internet TV users may jump onto the more powerful - and pricier - cable-modem service, Galarneau said. But many likely won't. "If they simply want to access information and get E-mail, getting it on the TV will be enough," he said.
Videotron is now preparing the groundwork with PowerTV, the Cupertino, Calif., software company that makes the operating system for the Explorer 2000, the Scientific-Atlanta set-top box used by its 46,000 digital cable subscribers.
With cable growth flat, Videotron is counting on the Internet and local telephone service over cable modems, to be unveiled within months, to squeeze more revenue out of subscribers.
Fast Internet is a hot product. Over the past year, the number of Videotron high-speed users has grown almost five-fold to 63,000.
Rogers and Shaw, cable companies with strong bases in Ontario and Western Canada, respectively, are experiencing even more dramatic high-speed growth. On Friday, Shaw said it would have signed up 30,000 new Internet customers in its last quarter had it not been for a shortage in Motorola modems. Instead, it signed up 20,000.
Sympatico, for its part, had 69,000 high-speed customers at the end of March and hopes to up that to 200,000 by yearend, after fixing software and customer-service glitches that plagued the service in 1999.
AOL Canada and Internet-on-TV-screen services are expected to capture a large share of the Internet market in coming years, said Mark Quigley, an Internet industry analyst with Yankee Group.
AOL is going to be a force to be reckoned with because of the enormous amount of content it'll gain when it swallows publishing, broadcasting and film giant Time Warner, Quigley noted. The company will be able to pump some of that content via high-speed pipes to its Internet customers.
So far, technology problems and a lack of marketing have held back Web-on-TV services such as Microsoft's WebTV service.
But surfing on TVs will eventually be big because it provides a cheap, convenient way for users to explore the Internet, Quigley said. "One of the things that holds people back from the Internet is the fact that a computer still costs $1,500."
Site Seeing
- AOL Canada: www.aol.ca
- Look: www.look.ca
- Videotron: internet.videotron.ca
- PowerTV: www.powertv.com
- Bell Sympatico: hse.sympatico.ca
- WebTV: www.webtv.com
- Send comments and story ideas to ariga@thegazette.southam.ca
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