OT> The fat is slowing being trimmed on regionals> Service Pushes T1 Price Barrier
October 22, 1998
Inter@ctive Week via NewsEdge Corporation : Competitive carriers are launching an all-out assault on the bread-and-butter service of the local phone companies, and the beneficiaries of the attack will be Internet service providers and their business customers.
This week, NorthPoint Communications Inc., one of the new generation of competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs), is slated to announce a $250 per- month service that offers two-way T1 -- 1.5-megabit-per-second service -- using Symmetric Digital Subscriber Line (SDSL) technology from Copper Mountain Inc. Another Copper Mountain customer, InterAccess Co., a Chicago-based Internet service provider (ISP) that has registered for CLEC status, will launch its own T1 equivalent service in parts of Chicago in January. Other competitive carriers are expected to follow suit.
The news is particularly good for ISPs, which resell telephone company T1s. Using NorthPoint's service, they now can offer their customers faster access at lower cost. NorthPoint sells its service to network service providers, particularly ISPs, in the metropolitan areas of Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, San Diego, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. The company will expand into Dallas, Detroit and Houston by year's end and plans to add 14 cities in 1999.
"This is definitely good news for ISPs," said Claudia Bacco, [x]DSL analyst at TeleChoice Inc.
The lower-cost service will enable ISPs to sell faster access to small to midsized businesses that want more than the 128 kilobits per second of Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) but can't afford a T1 from a local phone company, where rates range from $350 per month to as high as $1,000 per month.
Bacco doesn't expect every T1 customer to hop off the telephone company network and onto NorthPoint's net, however. "If you have a T1 connection that is nailed- up and busy eight hours a day between two locations, then you're not going to give that up for [x]DSL service," she said.
Companies using Asymmetric DSL (ADSL) service, which offers T1 rates only in the download direction with much slower upstream rates back to the network, may switch to a symmetric service like NorthPoint's if they are doing more than Internet access, she said; but for pure Web surfing, an ADSL service works fine.
Mike Borsetti, director of product management at NorthPoint (www.northpointcom.com), said the T1 rate service is available to businesses within 9,600 feet of a telephone company central office, which covers most metropolitan business districts. NorthPoint already offers an xDSL service at speeds up to 1.04 Mbps. With its latest offering, the company also announced a new ISDN-based xDSL service, called IDSL, that offers lower speeds but much longer reach. IDSL can deliver 144 Mbps at distances up to 36,000 feet. " We want to offer the broadest coverage possible and we think this does that, " he said.
InterAccess, the first ISP in the U.S. to offer fast access over ADSL technology two years ago, plans to build out its own network in Chicago, rather than use that of a data CLEC, said President Tim Simonds. "We think we can eliminate the middleman, and we think that gives us a service advantage and a price advantage," he said.
InterAccess (www.interaccess.com) plans to announce its pricing in December.
<<Inter@ctive Week -- 10-19-98>>
[Copyright 1998, Ziff Wire]
What about those bread-maker items for the regionals? New Service Pushes T1 Price Barrier
October 22, 1998
Inter@ctive Week via NewsEdge Corporation : Competitive carriers are launching an all-out assault on the bread-and-butter service of the local phone companies, and the beneficiaries of the attack will be Internet service providers and their business customers.
This week, NorthPoint Communications Inc., one of the new generation of competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs), is slated to announce a $250 per- month service that offers two-way T1 -- 1.5-megabit-per-second service -- using Symmetric Digital Subscriber Line (SDSL) technology from Copper Mountain Inc. Another Copper Mountain customer, InterAccess Co., a Chicago-based Internet service provider (ISP) that has registered for CLEC status, will launch its own T1 equivalent service in parts of Chicago in January. Other competitive carriers are expected to follow suit.
The news is particularly good for ISPs, which resell telephone company T1s. Using NorthPoint's service, they now can offer their customers faster access at lower cost. NorthPoint sells its service to network service providers, particularly ISPs, in the metropolitan areas of Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, San Diego, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. The company will expand into Dallas, Detroit and Houston by year's end and plans to add 14 cities in 1999.
"This is definitely good news for ISPs," said Claudia Bacco, [x]DSL analyst at TeleChoice Inc.
The lower-cost service will enable ISPs to sell faster access to small to midsized businesses that want more than the 128 kilobits per second of Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) but can't afford a T1 from a local phone company, where rates range from $350 per month to as high as $1,000 per month.
Bacco doesn't expect every T1 customer to hop off the telephone company network and onto NorthPoint's net, however. "If you have a T1 connection that is nailed- up and busy eight hours a day between two locations, then you're not going to give that up for [x]DSL service," she said.
Companies using Asymmetric DSL (ADSL) service, which offers T1 rates only in the download direction with much slower upstream rates back to the network, may switch to a symmetric service like NorthPoint's if they are doing more than Internet access, she said; but for pure Web surfing, an ADSL service works fine.
Mike Borsetti, director of product management at NorthPoint (www.northpointcom.com), said the T1 rate service is available to businesses within 9,600 feet of a telephone company central office, which covers most metropolitan business districts. NorthPoint already offers an xDSL service at speeds up to 1.04 Mbps. With its latest offering, the company also announced a new ISDN-based xDSL service, called IDSL, that offers lower speeds but much longer reach. IDSL can deliver 144 Mbps at distances up to 36,000 feet. " We want to offer the broadest coverage possible and we think this does that, " he said.
InterAccess, the first ISP in the U.S. to offer fast access over ADSL technology two years ago, plans to build out its own network in Chicago, rather than use that of a data CLEC, said President Tim Simonds. "We think we can eliminate the middleman, and we think that gives us a service advantage and a price advantage," he said.
InterAccess (www.interaccess.com) plans to announce its pricing in December.
<<Inter@ctive Week -- 10-19-98>>
[Copyright 1998, Ziff Wire]
|
