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Technology Stocks : George Gilder - Forbes ASAP -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: gdichaz who wrote (1542)	5/13/1999 9:57:00 PM
From: David E. Taylor	Respond to of 5853

Thought I'd add my personal 2c worth of experience to the DSL vs cable debate. I moved from Tucson AZ (where the local cable company had its head in the sand and US West was just "thinking" about DSL service) to Long Island last August. My inquiries to Bell Atlantic and Cablevision revealed that Bell Atlantic was also "planning" a DSL roll out but with no certain date, whereas Cablevision was about ready to go. I got in as an early sign-up in September, and the entire setup (NIC, cable modem, installation and software setup) cost $120, monthly service is $35.95. Cablevision has 2-way fiber on the pole across the street, and a splitter on the pole handles the upload/download internet signal through a dedicated co-ax cable (TV signal comes down a separate co-ax). After some early bugs with the local modem and the Cablevisions servers were worked out, the setup has been 100% reliable, 24 hours /day, since October 1998, with only one short outage recently (about 1 hour) for a server problem. No other down time, no problems. Cablevision's tech people tell me they have three T3 connections and will add more as they need them. They've been adding about 3000-4000 users/month and now have about 20,000 online, and I've not yet noticed any of the supposed slow down due to "sharing the bandwidth". Cablevision says that their fiber based network can handle any anticipated user load, since internet traffic (at least for now) to each user is intermittent and not continuous, though I can see that changing as streaming video traffic increases. While I don't get the advertised 1.5 mbps download speed (about 500 kbps seems to be the limit), Cablevision says this is a general internet and web site server restriction and not their system. So for now, and until Bell Atlantic wakes up with ADSL, I'm more than satisfied with the cable service, both cost and reliability. Seems to me Bell Atalntic is more interested in preserving their present monopoly of T1 and T3 lines and exorbitant local phone rates than deploying state of the art technology. Now if only I could bypass Bell Atlantic and get cheap local phone service via cable.... David T.