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To: dave turliku who wrote (7659)	11/17/1997 5:23:00 PM
From: jay silberman	Respond to of 21342

The USA Today article: usatoday.com 11/17/97- Updated 09:16 AM ET Modems let phone lines do double duty NEW YORK - Local phone companies are rolling out digital modems that create high-speed, 24-hour connections to the Internet and let people go on line and talk on the phone at the same time. GTE will announce Monday that it's offering digital subscriber line (DSL) service to large residential and office buildings in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago. DSL compresses data over regular copper phone wires. US West deployed the service two weeks ago in parts of Phoenix and SBC Communications is testing it in California. Bell Atlantic, Ameritech and BellSouth are testing, too, with rollouts planned next year. "I believe it will become very common in the next year," says Barry Nalls of GTE Communications. "It will become cheaper, and the economics will drive it to a wider deployment." DSL has been available to some businesses, but is just rolling into the consumer market. And it will be years before the service is ubiquitous. TeleChoice says there are 365,000 DSL lines across North America and expects 3.8 million by 2002. Dataquest expects only 450,000 U.S. lines in 2001. Either is a fraction of the nation's 175 million phone lines. Phone companies are trying to keep prices affordable. US West's service begins at $40 a month, plus installation and equipment fees of several hundred dollars. Carriers don't want to repeat the mistake they made with ISDN service, which was too expensive. Phone companies will go head-to-head against cable TV companies, which offer high-speed cable modems. In Phoenix, the first market where the technologies are pitted directly, US West is competing with cable's Cox Communications. DSL and cable modems offer more than just speed. They eliminate the need for separate phone and computer lines and let people stay on line 24 hours a day for a flat fee. That allows them to receive instant streams of news, stocks and sports scores on their PC. By Steve Rosenbush, USA TODAY ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Front page, News, Sports, Money, Life, Weather, Marketplace cCOPYRIGHT 1997 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.