Computer junkies often tout cyberspace’s great placelessness, gushing that the Internet is really based everyplace and no place at the same time, a thing apart from traditional geography.
Like many romantic notions, this is largely hogwash. These days especially, where you are can make all the difference in your Web-surfing pleasures.
Just ask Larry Lavery, who is absolutely delighted to be living in Arlington Heights, because it is located on the front line of the battle to bring ultra-high-speed data communications to the home.
Arlington Heights is among the first places in the nation where the local cable TV company, in this case TCI Communications Inc., is offering an Internet link over its network as a commercial service.
“I am an extremely heavy user of the Internet,” said Lavery, a computer consultant who works at home.
Off-loading a 14 megabyte file from the Internet takes less than 2 minutes over Lavery’s cable connection, compared with hours using his old phone-line link.
“I’m elated with the jump my productivity has taken,” Lavery said. His home computer is now performing almost as well as a machine in industry advertisements.
Lavery’s 8-year-old daughter, Sara, recently found a World Wide Web page on Ludwig van Beethoven as part of her research for a school paper. Besides finding information about the great composer’s life, she also downloaded color pictures and an audio clip of his music.
“With a cable modem, multimedia off the Internet becomes a real possibility,” Lavery said. “The Internet isn’t really very interactive because the wait times are so long that kids get bored. But when you drop the wait times, it really does get to be interactive and interest soars.”
While most home computer jocks debate buying a new phone modem to deliver information at 56,000 bits a second, a few are lucky enough to live where bit rates are measured in millions, instead of thousands. And telephone companies are working to assure that they will be able to compete with cable TV systems in bringing the million-bit world to America’s households.
Superspeed changes network computing so profoundly that many companies are betting millions that they’ll be the ones to deliver this speed to American homes. Those who win hope to insinuate themselves deeply into the fabric of electronic commerce. The losers could find themselves out of business.
A handful of Chicago-area companies are battling to be major providers of these ultrafast computer connections.
U.S. Robotics Corp. of Skokie and Schaumburg-based Motorola Inc. already are scrapping in the market with their competing 56-kilobit phone-line modems, but both know this is a short-term battle. The war itself is shifting to cable modems and a phone-line service called ADSL that can boost bit rates by orders of magnitude.
U.S. Robotics and Motorola both have strategies to fight the new cable modem war, and they will be joined by players that sat out early skirmishes, never making traditional modems. They include General Instrument Corp., the Chicago-based maker of cable and satellite TV equipment; Zenith Electronics Corp. of Glenview, maker of TV sets and cable TV set-top boxes, and Westell Technologies Inc., the Aurora-based firm that makes telephone equipment.
The technical issue is that the voice-oriented telephone network was not designed to deliver huge amounts of data quickly. Using it to access the Internet is like trying to get enough water through a garden hose to fight a house fire.
The traditional phone system “pipe” is just too narrow for the job. People in the business often refer to traditional phone lines as “narrowband” pipes, while what’s needed is a “broadband” pipe.
Using the coaxial cable that delivers cable TV programs is a natural solution because live video requires vastly more data than voice phone conversations, so the TV broadband pipe already is geared to carry fire-hose quantities of information.
It’s not a one-sided fight: There are drawbacks to cable Internet systems, and ways phone networks can break out of their small-pipe problem.
Although the Lavery family enjoys marvelous speed with its TCI Internet connection, the service only has been signing on new customers for a few weeks and is under no capacity strain.
“There’s no question that the technology works,” said Melissa Cook, an industry analyst with Prudential Securities. “The question is how scalable it is–whether when you go from 1,000 customers to 10,000, they will still be pleased with the service.”
Offering Internet connections isn’t an easy decision for a cable provider. Many have seen direct broadcast satellite digital services steal some of their best customers, and thus are more concerned with upgrading their video service to keep their core business competitive than they are with branching into the Internet.
After years of promising to upgrade TCI’s systems to offer digital TV, alternative telephony and high-speed Internet connections, the company’s chief executive, John Malone, has backed way off, promising now to stick to basic TV delivery in most places. Arlington Heights is one of only three TCI markets where his original promises are being fulfilled.
But several cable operators see Internet service as something satellite systems don’t provide and are aggressively moving into it, Cook said. “If this takes off as some operators expect, they won’t have trouble raising capital to get into it,” she said.
This is exactly the hope of all the vendors lining up to sell equipment that can deliver the Internet at super speeds. Although Motorola and Robotics can market their phone-line modems directly to customers, that’s not the case with cable modems, which only work if the operator offers an Internet service.
Initially, at least, vendors must sell their equipment to cable operators, who then install the service in customers’ homes.
“This is a technology in its infancy,” said William G. Luehrs, president of Zenith’s network systems division, “so it makes sense for the cable operator to bear the risk of obsolescence by buying the modems and leasing them to customers as part of the service.
“Once the technology has settled down, you’ll probably see some cable modems sold directly to the public.”
At Westell, executives also are pulling for cable modems to catch on with the public, even though the firm makes equipment for telephone networks, not cable TV.
Once customers start becoming hooked on high-speed Internet connections from cable TV, “it gets the attention of the incumbent phone company,” said Gary Seamans, Westell’s chief executive.
For five years, Westell has pioneered a technology called ADSL, for asymmetric digital subscriber line. It refers to a method that completely changes the way a home phone line is used to carry data to and from a computer.
This is a technologic cousin of something called ISDN, for integrated services digital network, a data transmission idea that never took off because of insufficient standardization, high prices and lack of compelling applications.
ADSL’s backers say they’ve learned their lessons from ISDN and don’t intend to see the new method die from lack of nurture.
Instead of converting data to sounds and transmitting it over the regular phone network, ADSL spreads out the data to use more of the copper line than is engaged for phone conversations.
Equipment installed in central offices of the phone network grabs the ADSL data stream before it hits traditional switches and routes it directly into the Internet.
This bypass of the regular phone network is what enables ADSL to boost data transmission by factors of 50 or 100 over today’s modems. Like most major telephone companies, Chicago-based Ameritech Corp. is testing ADSL technology now.
The test, using Westell equipment, has connected more than 120 residences and businesses in Wheaton to the Internet. It is likely that Ameritech will start to offer ADSL service commercially by early next year, said chief executive Richard C. Notebaert.
“The technology works wonderfully,” he said. “The issue right now is cost. It takes our people an average of 2.5 hours to install it. We’ve got to get that down to an hour or so. Once we do, it’ll be affordable.”
Some companies, like Zenith, are concentrating Internet efforts on cable modem technology, betting that the cable TV industry will move forward quickly. Others, like Westell, believe that the issue is far too important for phone companies to let competitors steal a march on them.
General Instrument is betting both ways. It has cable modems in the market and is working to develop a family of ADSL products for the phone industry.
“Our business strategy is to exploit broadband communications across all sectors of the industry,” said Kenneth Pelowski, General Instrument’s vice president for corporate development. The firm is also working on wireless technology to deliver broadband solutions.
Wireless links received a big boost last week from the Federal Communications Commission, which voted to auction off fat chunks of the radio spectrum for use by firms that want to provide voice, video and high-speed Internet connections in competition with existing wireline systems.
Pelowski expects that next year will see many cable TV operators and phone companies begin to offer high-speed Internet connections at competitive prices–in the range of the $40 a month TCI now charges in Arlington Heights.
“After six years of investment and research, this will happen next year and people will call it an `overnight success,’ ” Pelowski said.
The race to deliver high-speed Internet access is about much more than who will collect another $40 a month from America’s computerized homes, although that is by no means trivial. What most players believe is that this a battle over who will dominate access to electronic commerce in the next century.
“The whole thing is about being able to buy and sell over the Web,” said Robert Rosenberg, president of Insight Research Corp., based in Livingston, N.J. “Electronic commerce requires these high data transfer speeds.
“When you peel back the onion, everybody wants to be the company that makes it all happen, the broker who gets 2 or 3 cents on every transaction that takes place. We’re talking billions and billions of dollars at stake. It’ll be much bigger than, say, merely supplying long distance or local phone service.”
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Tuesday: How broadband technology will change your life.
