pril 28, 1999
High-Speed Access Begins to Alter the Role the
Internet Plays in the Home
By AMY HARMON
he 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." |
