PERSONAL COMPUTING / By ROB FIXMER
Phone Companies Create Traffic Jam on
Road to Internet
he next high hurdle for the personal computer industry is keeping
many a chip maker and computer manufacturer awake at night,
because after 15 years of building ever faster and more powerful
machines, the wizards of silicon increasingly find themselves at the mercy
of local phone companies.
The hurdle is the capacity of a channel to carry
signals from one point to another, known as
bandwidth. The channel in question is the local
telephone network, and as the future of
computing comes to rest more and more with
the Internet, the phone companies represent a
serious bottleneck. No matter how much faster
the microprocessors and memory chips, no
matter how much more efficient the
architecture of the machines, the finest
computer technology dead-ends with the
phone jack in every consumer's wall.
Computer technology gave us the Internet; telephone technology gave us
the World Wide Wait. The reason for this is rooted in vast differences
between the two industries.
Dealing in microscopic distances, the chip makers have grown
accustomed to improving performance continually and exponentially by
finding ways to reduce the lengths of paths that electrons must travel
within silicon wafers while at the same time multiplying the number of
paths within the chips and between components. The net result has been
an enormous increase in bandwidth -- and in power.
Intel Corporation's 8088 microprocessor, the brains of the original I.B.M.
PC, could carry out about 750,000 instructions per second at a speed of
8 million cycles per second, or megahertz. Today's Intel Pentium II
processor can carry out 855 million instructions per second at a speed of
up to 450 megahertz.
Things have not moved so fast in the world of telephones. True, digital
switches and fiberoptic cables have greatly expanded the total number of
calls that can be placed at any one time. But the capacity of the typical
phone line in a typical home is virtually the same today as it was in the
1960's. Only so many electrons can be squeezed through a copper wire.
The computer industry has long struggled to compensate for this
weakness. The first breakthrough came in the late 1970's when Ward
Christensen, an engineer with the International Business Machines
Corporation and an early personal computer enthusiast, invented an
error-correction technology and released it to the public domain. Until
then, modems -- devices that enable computers to communicate over
telephone lines by converting digital signals into sounds on one end of the
call and from sounds back to digital signals at the other end -- were
largely useless because phone lines were so noisy that the receiving
modem often failed to differentiate signal from noise.
Since then, modem makers have made enormous strides in error
correction and in pushing ever more information through standard phone
lines. First the Hayes Corporation and later USRobotics led the way in
accelerating data transmission from 300 bits per second in the early
1980's to 1,200, then 2,400 and on up to today's 56K modems, which
can theoretically receive 56 thousand bits per second.
But 56K modems are limited by Federal telephone rules to 53,000 bits
per second. And the erratic quality of local phone service limits them even
more.
For example, a state of the art USRobotics 56K modem can achieve a
speed no greater than 26,400 bits per second in many of the most densely
populated areas of the East Coast, including big parts of Manhattan and
New Jersey, because the local phone company, Bell Atlantic, has not
upgraded its cables and switches to the demands of high-speed data. In
fact, in many instances, it has installed technologies that compress
bandwidth in order to carry more voice calls, which coincidentally
reduces the capacity of its lines to carry data calls.
A Bell Atlantic representative informs an inquiring consumer that the
company is not obligated to carry high-speed data calls, so unless the
customer is willing to buy a special modem and fork over a hefty
installation fee plus high monthly charges for an I.S.D.N. (integrated
services digital network) line, he or she will be living with a maximum
speed of 26,400 bits per second, or less, for the foreseeable future.
Local phone companies respond that they cannot keep up with the
demand as families order separate lines for children, fax machines and
modems. But critics say this has more to do with the corporate culture of
a regulated monopoly than with telephone technology.
The computer industry knows that pointing fingers accomplishes nothing;
at the end of the day, a lot of computer power is still dammed up behind
the modem. So the industry has begun wooing the local phone companies
with incentives.
The carrot is a standard for A.D.S.L. (asymmetric digital subscriber line),
a technology that offers simultaneous voice and data calls at speeds up to
8 million bits per second over standard copper wires. This technology and
other flavors of digital subscriber lines have been around for a long time,
but the phone companies have quarreled bitterly over a standard.
So earlier this year, Compaq, Intel and Microsoft helped to form the
Universal A.D.S.L. Working Group and anointed a standard known as
G.lite. Yet the phone companies have not yet ratified G.lite, so the first
modems will not be available until at least well into next year, and it could
take decades for this technology to reach all American homes.
Thus the stick: building specific circuitry, known as ethernet, into its
machines to allow them to connect directly to cable modems without a
special installation. The most recent example of this is the Apple iMac, a
home-market computer that has built-in ethernet circuitry. Ethernets are
the standard networks used in businesses, but the only use for such
technology in the vast majority of homes is to connect the computer to the
phone companies' most dangerous competition in data bandwidth -- cable
television companies that offer high-speed Internet access.
And just in case that fails to get the local phone companies' attention,
Microsoft's chairman, William H. Gates, earlier this year invested $1
billion in the Comcast cable television network, one of the most
aggressive marketers of cable modem services, while the Bells'
progenitor, A.T.&T., is buying TCI, the nation's largest cable television
operator and the largest stockholder of At-Home, the leading cable
modem service.
If the local phone companies fail to make A.D.S.L. widely available soon
and at a competitive price, the computer industry is poised to quickly
embrace cable or other alternative channels. And many of those channels
will one day offer local and long-distance phone services.
PERSONAL COMPUTING is published weekly, on Tuesdays.
Click here for a list of links to other columns in the series.
Rob Fixmer at rob@nytimes.com welcomes your comments and
suggestions.
|
