Ameritech Corp. will soon be offering high-speed data connections in Ann Arbor, Mich., but hasn’t yet decided when it will offer similar service in the Chicago region, Richard C. Notebaert, Ameritech’s chief executive, said Monday.
Notebaert said Ameritech has signed a deal with the University of Michigan to offer up to 20,000 students and faculty members living off-campus high-speed connections by the start of their next semester, using technology called asymmetric digital subscriber line service.
ADSL delivers Internet connections at speeds 50 or 100 times greater than standard modem hookups.
Ameritech originally had planned to begin offering ADSL connections in the Chicago area this summer, but has only rolled out the service to parts of Wheaton and Naperville, where the service was being tested.
Notebaert, who announced the Ann Arbor deal at a communications industry meeting at the O’Hare Hyatt Hotel, said that Ameritech is holding back on a Chicago ADSL rollout because of concerns about government regulations.
“We may not know until January when we’ll roll out ADSL in Chicago,” Notebaert said.
The Federal Communications Commission has indicated that if local phone companies like Ameritech offer ADSL, they must do so through a separate subsidiary. Although some phone companies have balked at that, Notebaert said he likes that arrangement and had already planned for Ameritech’s ADSL to be handled through a subsidiary.
The problem, he said, is that it isn’t clear whether Ameritech’s subsidiary will meet the FCC’s final regulations once they are adopted.
“The level of detail the FCC wants may not be clear until January,” Notebaert said. “We don’t know if they’ll be reasonable or if they’ll try to micromanage it.”
Ameritech also is unsure about the terms it will be required to give competitors that want to resell its ADSL service, Notebaert said. His firm has filed several objections with the FCC about its initial proposed resale requirements.
Speaking at the National Communications Forum of the International Engineering Consortium, Notebaert predicted that today’s voice-oriented telephone network is evolving quickly toward becoming a data connection network.
Converting voice to digital bits and transmitting them like data in separate packets can be done today, Notebaert said, but it often results in echoes or other degradation of quality. Soon these problems will be overcome, Notebaert told the conference, and voice can be transmitted just like data.
“Inevitably, we will evolve to the point when the public switched voice network becomes our public switched multimedia network,” Notebaert said.
“In essence, we’ll always be on-line,” Notebaert told the industry group. “And that capability will enable us to develop applications we can’t even imagine today.”
