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To: freeus who wrote (15739)	5/7/1999 5:50:00 PM
From: Sam	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 41369

This is a great read on the daunting task ahead of T in implementing their billion dollar investments in cable - nytimes.com The highlights (lots of them!): AT&T Corp. has committed itself to spending more than $90 billion on a technological vision that is largely untested and that may not exist anywhere on but AT&T's drawing boards. But the technical and organizational challenges standing between that vision and AT&T's present are so great that one AT&T executive likened AT&T's ambitions to launching a space station. It will probably take years for most people, even those in AT&T's cable markets, to see tangible results of the company's ambitions. But even once a cable system has been adapted to send and receive data, voice and television signals, it is still not ready for the digital future. To offer high-speed Internet service, huge investments must be made in high-speed Internet switches that can route millions, even billions of bits of digital information every second. Another challenge is that traditional cable systems generally use public power. When there is an electrical blackout, the cable television also fails, but the phone almost always works. The upshot for AT&T is that all of the billions of dollars and millions of hours it will spend on the obvious technical challenges may pale beside the time, effort and money it will spend revamping its organization and deploying the anonymous "back office" computer systems that are the backbone of any modern business. One challenge in finding qualified dispatchers, supervisors and other sorts of support personnel is that almost no company in the world has tried to sell integrated bundles of telephone, television and Internet services to residential consumers who might not know a modem from a remote control. S.