Front Page NY Times story today on High Speed Internet Connections:
nytimes.com
April 28, 1999
High-Speed Access Begins to Alter the Role the Internet Plays in the Home
By AMY HARMON
The craving for speed seized John Drees the day after he bought his first personal computer late last year. In a stir-crazy state that most everyone who uses the Internet from home can identify with, he counted the minutes it took for Web pages to appear on his screen. He paced as his standard modem -- the fastest on the market -- took an hour to funnel a huge file to his hard drive, only to lose the connection before he was finished.
Then Drees, a college professor in Jenkintown, Pa., stepped through a looking glass that transformed his journey from home to cyberspace: he got a cable modem. Now, over the same wires that provide his cable television service, he travels the Net roughly 50 times as fast as he did before.
"Every time I go on it's just amazing to me," Drees said in the hushed
tones with which many recent converts speak of their high-speed Internet
connections. "Look," he told a visitor, twirling through a 3-D animated
tour of a World War II submarine. "It's changed everything."
Next door, Brian and Lisa Banberger can't help but agree. They opted
for a comparably fast service -- not from the cable company, but from
Bell Atlantic, the local phone company. More than the speed, Brian is
enamored of the fact that the line is always open, turning the Internet into
a silent, beckoning presence on his desk whenever his computer is turned
on.
So far the two households in Jenkintown, a well-to-do Philadelphia
suburb, are among just over half a million across the nation to sample the
phenomenon known among technology wonks as broadband.
Much-hyped and long-delayed, high-speed Internet access is finally
coming to the home, with research firms predicting that 10 to 16 million
households will sign up by 2002.
Such fast connections via phone and cable lines will become widely
available over the next year, at a cost of $35 to $200 a month plus
installation. The experience of the early users offers a glimpse at the
Internet's next frontier, where waiting is rare, dialing in is unnecessary and
local communications monopolies are for the first time vying for
customers.
"Broadband is the Internet's next
version," said Kevin Werbach, editor
of Release 1.0, a technology industry
newsletter. "It's a fundamental
advance over what we have now."
In the most obvious sense, broadband crosses a technical threshold that
has long been a major goal of media and technology companies: enough
bytes can be squeezed over their wires to make video over the Internet
look more like television and audio sound more like radio. As a result,
downloading the two-and-a-half-minute trailer for the new "Star Wars"
movie over a cable modem takes about two minutes, compared with
about two hours over a conventional modem.
But the most far-reaching effect on the daily lives of broadband users is
this: the Internet is no longer something they have to get to; instead, it is
always there.
The combination of speed and ease of access suddenly makes it
worthwhile to use the Internet for a myriad of tasks from looking up a
phone number to listening to music.
"Broadband has integrated the Internet into my life a hundred times more
than it was before," said Christopher Mines, an analyst at Forrester
Research, who moved his computer to the kitchen when he got his cable
modem and says most mornings his newspaper stays in the driveway.
"What happens is the Web starts to take over from other resources."
Indeed, if millions of Americans now dabble in electronic shopping,
banking, publishing and information gathering, broadband seems poised
to significantly alter the nature of those activities as well as the number of
those who engage in them.
Already, some of the bandwidth-obsessed are making decisions on
where to buy their homes based on the availability of high-speed access.
In the geographical pockets where broadband has become available,
neighbors are comparing download speeds and modem installation fees
in a 1999 version of keeping up with the Joneses.
Even more striking than the speed, many users say, is the way the
"always on" connection removes a psychological barrier between the user
and cyberspace. Although the difference between booting up broadband
and dial-up access is only a matter of moments and a screech of the
modem, it seems enough to tip the balance, making for shorter, but far
more frequent sessions at the screen.
And with high-speed access, high-quality video and audio will become a
more routine part of the Internet experience, with the advantage of being
able to choose what you want to see and hear, and when.
"If we do it right, by the back half of this year you're going to see big
spike in consumption of video and audio," said Jeff Mallett, president of
Yahoo, the prominent Internet company whose purchase of
Broadcast.com earlier this month for a stunning $5.6 billion reflected its
faith in the future of broadband.
Yahoo, for instance, anticipates that people who check their stock
quotes in the finance area of its site will supplement the experience with a
video news clip about their companies, or an audio address by the chief
executive. Businesses from mortgage lenders to car dealers are expected
to take advantage of the ease of video conferencing over high-speed lines
to entice customers to make significant purchasing decisions over the
Internet that they would be unlikely to make without some human
interaction.
The technology also makes it possible for anyone to become not only a
consumer but also a broadcaster of audio and video, sending continuous
sound and images to other computers across the Internet.
John Breuer, 37, a network engineer in Danville, Calif., who last month
subscribed to Pacific Bell's high-speed service known as digital
subscriber line, or D.S.L., now regularly plays Led Zeppelin over what
amounts to his own radio station, accessible to anyone who has
downloaded the free software that enables them to listen.
While he works and spins tunes from home over the same wires that
provide his phone service, he sometimes carries on a live video
conversation with his brother in Grand Forks, N.D., who was never big
on e-mail. Asked if his new Internet habits cut into any of his other
activities, Breuer cites housework. "It could easily reach what I would
call epidemic proportions in terms of addiction level," he said.
Heralded for nearly a decade as the Internet's imminent multimedia
future, the deployment of broadband technology has been long delayed in
part because the technology was not ready and in part because cable
companies did not devote the cash to get it ready. And without being
prodded by competition, phone companies were disinclined to offer a far
less expensive service that would eat into the lucrative high-speed T1
service that they now sell to many businesses at a cost of tens of
thousands of dollars a year.
Now, cable companies, flush with capital from a series of investments
like AT&T's purchase of Tele-Communications Inc., the largest cable
operator, are upgrading their equipment. The companies are eager to
supplement the annual $25 billion cable service with broadband revenues
that Forrester estimates will reach $5.7 billion by 2001. Local phone
companies, whose $90 billion phone service market is already under
siege from long-distance carriers and cable companies providing
dial-tone service, have their own reasons to follow suit.
"We're preparing for a battle royal," said Richard Rasmus, general
manager of Philadelphia-based Comcast.
Pete Castleton, executive director for Bell Atlantic's high-speed products
replies simply, "Our intention is to beat cable modems."
Currently, cable companies are equipped to provide cable modem
service to about 23 million households nationwide, and phone companies
are wired to offer D.S.L. to another 6 million. The areas of availability
remain a patchwork -- for example, in New York City, only a few
homes can get cable modem service, but it is offered in many areas of
New Jersey, Long Island and Connecticut. Bell Atlantic, which provides
D.S.L. connections in parts of northern New Jersey, says that by the end
of the year it will offer service to about 2.2 million homes in the
metropolitan area, including areas of New York City.
Also at stake in the broadband wars is the future of the 4,500 Internet
service providers who now offer dial-up access to American households,
one-quarter of which are now online. Because cable modem service
includes Internet access, companies like America Online, by far the
nation's biggest Internet service provider with 16 million customers, are
scrambling to strike deals with the regional Bell companies to offer
high-speed service over their digital telephone lines. And a high-stakes
lobbying battle is unfolding in Washington and across the country over
whether cable companies -- notably AT&T, as a condition of its
acquisition of Tele-Communications -- should be compelled to establish
a level playing field for Internet providers over their cable lines.
Is all the fuss worth it? If the smug tone that creeps into conversations
with many of the early broadband subscribers is any indication, speed
does make a difference. A typical Internet user today connects at speeds
between 28,800 and 53,000 bits a second. Cable modems and D.S.L.
are between 10 and 80 times as fast.
"I was over at my brother-in-law's the other day and sat at his modem
and that's when I really realized how much better I have it than all those
folks still on 28.8," said Banberger, Drees's neighbor in Jenkintown and
an executive at a health care information publishing company. "It's like
when you got automatic door locks on your car, and at first you thought,
'Do I really need this?' Once you have them you can never go back."
Banberger's wife, Lisa, isn't as thrilled with the new setup, since she says
her husband spends more time online now than he did before.
But both like the fact that their three young daughters, who used to be
too bored to wait for Web pages to show up on the screen, now
regularly sit in their father's desk chair and explore.
The main virtue of D.S.L. is that it offers higher guaranteed speeds than
do cable modems.
But its range is limited: people who live more than about three miles from
a local switching station cannot get D.S.L. service. And both cable
modems and D.S.L. service provide faster transmission of data to the
home than from the home -- on the theory that consumers would rather
watch video over the Internet, for instance, than broadcast their own to
the world.
For the moment, cable modems are more readily available, and are
typically a bit faster than the average D.S.L. connection. But because
each household in a given area shares the cable network, the more
subscribers, the slower their connections can be.
Cable executives insist that they can add capacity to maintain the speed,
but customers in several markets including Fremont, Calif., and
Connecticut have complained about slow speeds.
"I keep a stopwatch here at my computer," said Marshall Wice, 75, of
Hartford, who has cable modem service through Tele-Communications.
"Sometimes I'm downloading two, three, four-meg files in less than a
minute. But at night, forget about it. It just drags and drags and drags."
Scott Wolfington, 28, who chose his home in Foothill Ranch, Calif., in
part because Cox Cable was offering high-speed service in the area, also
sometimes feels his connection is slow. But he has a remedy: "When I
feel myself getting spoiled I make myself spend some time on a 28.8
modem," he said. "That's when reality sets in."
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The waves just keep coming,
Michael |
