Despite trials, Internet cable access years off

By Anne Knowles
PC Week

August 7, 1995

In ongoing field trials of high-speed Internet access, cable companies and testers in both homes and small businesses are finding that high costs and evolving technologies will push widespread availability into the 21st century.

Driving the cable push is user demand for faster access to the heretofore plodding World-Wide Web. Current fast modems transmit data at 14.4K bps to 28.8K bps, but broadband technologies using hybrid fiber or coaxial networks hope to push that limit to 10M bps.

Full-fledged Internet cable networks, however, will require technology that is still in development, according to analysts.

"The cable companies would prefer switched digital video architecture," said Carl Lehmann, a senior research analyst at Meta Group Inc., in Stamford, Conn. "That is in development now and won't roll off the assembly line until late 1996 or early 1997. Then it will take a long time for implementation." Services won't be common until 2010, he added.

Switched digital video offers broadband communications via fiber-optic cable and enables providers to deliver multiple services over the same pipe.

About a half-dozen trials using retrofitted technology are currently under way. As part of ongoing buildouts, cable operators have been replacing one-way amplifiers with two-way, and tying their head ends into the Internet, according to Andy White, a senior IS specialist with Cable Television Laboratories, in Louisville, Colo.

Also keeping costs high are the cable modems necessary to connect a user's PC to the cable system. Cox Communications, for example, uses $4,000 cable modems for LANs to connect users in its trial in Warwick, R.I., according to Andy Green of Intellicom Data Systems Inc., in East Greenwich, R.I., the Internet provider working with Cox on the trial.

Cable modem maker LANcity Corp., in Andover, Mass., however, is expected to deliver to Cox this month single-system modems for $600. Hewlett-Packard Co. plans to ship a $400 cable modem in the second quarter of 1996, said Lorraine Bartlett, an HP product manager in Santa Clara, Calif.

Cox is also conducting trials in San Diego and soon will be in Omaha, Neb., said Craig Watson, a Cox vice president in West Warwick, R.I. The cable operator is working with Digital Equipment Corp. at a Phoenix office park to enable the park's companies to exchange data via cable networks.

However, John Aronsohn, an analyst with the Yankee Group Inc., in Boston, said, "it is a huge culture change for [cable companies] to offer anything as complex" as TCP/IP network management and computer support.

Among eager users is Scott Bradner, a senior technical consultant at Harvard University and a home beta tester of Internet access in a trial in Cambridge, Mass., that's being offered by Continental Cablevision and Performance Systems International Inc., an access provider in Herndon, Va.

"It is a nice, clean solution. I get half a megabit to the house, and the advantage is I don't have to go out to dinner while it works," said Bradner. "I'm not paying for it now, and I've heard it will likely cost between $30 and $99 [per month]. In that range, I'd pay for it."