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Non-Tech : Amati investors -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: pat mudge who wrote (28506)	11/10/1997 12:18:00 AM
From: Chemsync	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 31386

[ADSL Report From England--Nov.10, 1997] <<BT has little doubt about the DSL age and it believes Internet type services will prove to be the trigger for a large commercial market.>> From:http://www.electronicsweekly.co.uk/ew/index.cgi?2:issue/home.shtm ON THE LINE Welcome to the digital subscriber line.... it could enhance all our lives and wrestle the power out of the hands of the phone operators and into the hands of the user. Hard to believe? Richard Wilson reports A pleasant but pushy young man in a neat suit stands on your doorstep and asks if you would like to receive all the satellite TV channels including the football, free local telephone calls, not to mention new dial-a-video and home-banking services. You say: "Sure thing, but this street has not been dug up for cable yet and I don't want a dish on the roof." The man smiles: "No problem. We can deliver all that down your existing BT telephone line." The age of the digital subscriber line is upon us. The technology exists to transmit a digital communications channel with enough bandwidth to carry a couple of TV channels, an Internet gateway and voice telephony into the telephone socket on your wall. It is called the digital subscriber line, or DSL. However, it is possible that some of Europe's telephone operators have been caught flat-footed by the speed of DSL technology developments in the US. The user terminals capable of receiving DSL services are being sold in the US and should soon be available over here. But if the telephone operators are not ready, or legally allowed, to provide the types of multimedia services possible with the DSL there is little point in dashing out to buy one of the high-tech terminals. The European Commission has jumped on the DSL bandwagon and is considering a change in community law which - if adopted by national governments - could force telecommunications network operators, such as BT, to provide multimedia services, such as high speed Internet access and video-on-demand, based on the broadband communications technologies. The equipment providers are fast coming to the conclusion that broadband communications to the home is no longer a technical issue - but a legal one. What the bureaucrats in Brussels are proposing is that telephone operators will be obliged to ensure that telecommunications equipment approved for connection to the network will work. In a sense this already exists in the UK with all telephony terminals approved by the official BABT authority. Only terminals which are BABT approved can be connected to BT's network and BT, along with its competitor operators, are obliged under their licenses to make the network compatible with all BABT-approved terminals. "If they fail to do so they will be in breach of their license," said a spokeswoman at telecoms watchdog Oftel. The BABT approval mechanism is only part of the story. It operates at the level of network interconnection, ie the impedances, voltage levels and signalling schemes that will allow a telephone to operate on the network. BABT is not about guaranteeing the types of service available. If this wider ranging telecommunications service obligation is what the European Commission is considering then it will open up a hornets nest of legal implications. Not least the individual's right to demand the type of telecommunications service they want and believe they have paid for my purchasing a specific DSL terminal. The first legal hurdle to be cleared in the UK will be the present restriction on BT, which prevents it from offering video-on-demand services over its telephone network, even if it wanted to. That is an eight year ruling which dates back to former Oftel supremo Sir Bryan Carsberg's watershed review of the British telephone market back in 1990. Sir Peter Bonfield, BT's chief executive, believes that restriction has long passed its sell-by date and recent exchanges between Sir Peter and Prime Minister Tony Blair would seem to indicate that a scrapping of the old "Tory" rule is a formality. So much so that BT is powering ahead with its biggest project to connect homes to multimedia services. BT plans to connect 2,000 homes in West London next year with a broadband DSLtechnology called asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL) which will enable a 6Mbit/s digital data stream to be pumped into the home through the good old telephone jack. That's the equivalent of two digital TV channels, home-shopping and Internet access 40 times faster than current modems. BT has little doubt about the DSL age and it believes Internet type services will prove to be the trigger for a large commercial market. "We have already proved [with BT's interactive television trials in East Anglia and Westminster] that there was a sustainable market for such services," said a spokesman. "But since then the Internet has come along in leaps and bounds." The Internet is raising user expectations about what can be achieved using digital communications in the home. Access to databases, interactive shopping services and video all from a PC and a modem at the click of a mouse. It is early days yet, but the multimedia communications bandwagon is rolling. Tony Blair's recent championing of Internet access for schools and libraries, with the help of guess who? BT, is just one manifestation of the arrival of the DSL age. It is totally in character with the European approach to individual rights, that already the commissioners are looking at ways to ensure that all European citizens can not only expect, but demand, the types of interactive, multimedia communications services that are now technically possible. The DSL age will see a shift of power from the telephone operator to the user. That is a concept that British telephone customers, the market regulators, even the neatly dressed man from the phone company, have yet to get their collective minds around. Come on you Brits webmaster@electronicsweekly.co.uk