Livewire: DSL Taking On Cable Modems
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Bandwidth News
By Michelle V. Rafter
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - When the Internet access technology known as digital subscriber line, or DSL, first appeared almost three years ago, it was widely hailed as a new, faster way for businesses to get online -- but too high-priced for consumers.
That was then. Now it looks as if DSL will give families, as well as small and mid-sized businesses, a reasonably priced option for logging on at speeds up to 200 times faster than a 28.8 kilobits-per-second dial-up telephone modem. That puts DSL in the ring with cable TV operators' cable-modem service, until now the broadband Net connection champ.
What's caused the change? The biggest reason is price. Since the beginning of the year, fees for residential DSL service have dropped to around $50 a month, from $100 or more. At the lower price, DSL -- which uses existing telephone lines to connect users to the Internet and allows people to talk on the phone while they're logged on -- is just slightly more expensive than the cost of Net access via a cable modem, or the monthly service charges for a second phone line and Internet access provider.
''That's kicked it into gear,'' said Bob Granadino, director of high-speed access at EarthLink Network (www.earthlink.net), a Pasadena, Calif.-based national Internet service provider testing DSL service in California in advance of a late July rollout.
The number of people and companies hooking up to the Internet via DSL is still minuscule compared with cable-modem users. Both are dwarfed by the tens of millions of home Internet users who log on through dial-up modems, or at work, via T1 or other large ''pipes.''
According to telecommunications industry researcher TeleChoice (www.telechoice.com), the number of DSL subscribers in the United States stands at 92,000 but should reach 250,000 by year's end, and grow to 1.6 million by 2001. That compares with a U.S. cable-modem user population of 700,000 as of mid-April, according to Kinetic Strategies (www.kineticstrategies.com), a Phoenix cable-modem researcher.
In the past five months, DSL offers have exploded from telephone companies, as well as from Internet service providers, or ISP, and new DSL-only service providers, both of which wholesale DSL services from local phone companies or their competitors to resell to the public.
In the past two weeks alone, national ISP Prodigy (www.prodigy.com) struck a deal with Bell Atlantic (www.bellatlantic.com) to use the latter's telephone lines to offer DSL service to Prodigy customers in parts of New York, Washington, Boston and Philadelphia within the next 60 days. In the same time, U S West (www.uswest.com), which is being acquired by Global Crossing (www.globalcrossing.com), said a top priority after the merger will be rolling out DSL service to its customers nationwide, building on a subscriber base that already totals 35,000.
America Online (www.aol.com), CompuServe (www.compuserve.com), MindSpring Enterprises (www.mindspring.com) and all the regional telephone companies have DSL plans in the works. Even Tandy (www.tandy.com) is planning to use its Radio Shack home electronic stores to get into the business.
Despite lower prices and better availability, choosing DSL is far from a no-brainer. For one thing, it's harder to get started than buying a dial-up account with an Internet service provider. Customers need a DSL modem. Most providers rent or sell residential customers an external model that connects to a personal computer or Macintosh as well as to their phone line. They also need an Ethernet or other network interface card; some new PCs and iMacs have this built in, but older machines don't, which means a trip to the store to buy one.
In most instances, the DSL provider dispatches a service representative to install equipment, including a ''splitter'' that divides the telephone line into two parts, one for voice and the other for data. Because house calls are time-consuming and expensive -- installation fees run $100 to $200 -- DSL providers hope eventually to make installing equipment simple enough for customers to do themselves.
The technology has other limitations. DSL is only available in areas where telephone companies have installed enabling technology in their computerized switching hubs, otherwise known as central offices. So ISPs are limited to offering DSL connections in areas where the phone companies they contract with have installed the equipment. Because bandwidth degenerates with distance from the central office, some people will not be able to get the service.
Cable operators believe these negatives will continue to steer people seeking faster Internet connections to cable-modem service.
''We have a proven, deployed technology that's been up and running three years,'' said Sandy Colony, public relations vice president at Road Runner (www.rr.com), a cable-modem joint venture between MediaOne and Time Warner with 300,000 subscribers. ''That may not seem like a long time, but in the Internet world it is.''
Some ISPs aren't taking their chances. Companies such as MindSpring and Earthlink plan to offer both options.
''We're agnostic as far as mode of delivery goes. We'll offer customers whatever they want: cable, DSL, ISDN or dial-up,'' said Earthlink's Granadino.
Some DSL companies could have even more customers, if they could find a way to install equipment faster. At Flashcom (www.flashcom.com), a DSL-only Internet access company in Huntington Beach, Calif., new customers are waiting four to five weeks to get hooked up.
''The orders are just so high,'' said DSL product manager Anita Messier. ''It takes more a little time (than installing dial-up service). But we need to get it down.''
(Michelle V. Rafter writes about cyberspace and technology from Los Angeles. Reach her at mvrafter(at)deltanet.com. Opinions expressed in this column are her own.) |
