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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John F. Dowd who wrote (19605)	4/2/1999 8:50:00 PM
From: RTev	Respond to of 74651

OT: I will call Bell Atlantic or check it out on the web: bell-atl.com The problem with DSL in rural and some suburban areas is that most houses are too far away from the switches to use it. It's not worth it to put in the equipment for just a few people. It sounds like cable or wireless broadband are likely to be the best choices in rural areas for a long time to come, since it doesn't sound like DSL is going to overcome its distance sensitivity any time soon. (But then again, modems doubled in speed for a long time while folks said they'd never get any faster.) Both BellAtlantic and USWest rolled out sophisticated true-broadband delivery systems in test markets. Both seemed to have ignored DSL while they tried to get something better. Fortunately for their shareholders, USWest managed to put together enough cable systems as part of the experiments that they could spin that part off into a successful independent cable company, MediaOne (which is now being bought by Comcast). But we never heard about DSL until MediaOne was gone from the main company. The good news seems to be that the all of the RBOCS have embraced DSL and are being forced by competitive pressure to roll it out as widely and quickly as possible. Some interesting things are coming with it, too: A posting on another topic here said that USWest will soon offer a Cisco-developed system that allows business DSL customers to add up to 9 voice lines to the data line on a single RADSL connection.