Investments
aim to improve broadband infrastructure.
By Kevin Kipp
If theologians can talk about “different windows on The [same]
Truth,” why do players in broadband never ask, “Can’t we all
just get along?”
Instead, SBC Communications ads characterize cable modem broadband
(like AT&T @Home installs) as cause for internecine warfare,
neighbor savaging neighbor’s sunny little marigolds with weed
whackers over white picket fences.
AT&T, reported the Wall Street Journal in September, returns
fire in some SBC markets outside St. Louis by highlighting digital
subscriber line’s limitations in its ads: The long wait for
DSL installations, which has also been reported in local media.
“The customer is interested in reliable, always-on, high-speed
access,” says Brian Butler, vice president of engineering at
Gabriel Communications. “If you can deliver that, customers
don’t care if it’s DSL or cable.”
Mind you, cable modem and DSL architectures have distinctive
limitations. Spokefolk at AT&T and SBC, however, have answers.
Butler, meanwhile, speaks highly of DS-1 lines, “which are considerably
more expensive when used solely for data. But if you use it
for the full suite of local and long distance telephone and
Internet services, then it’s a more economical solution.”
The problem with DSL, he continues, isn’t just demand. “The
connection from your home all the way to the central office
has to be copper. If there’s any fiber on the route in between,
you can’t run it. Nor can you put digital looped carrier—which
is extremely common—in between.”
Well golly, everybody knows that, not to mention (as Butler
did) the problems with “load coils” and “bridge tap.” Or that
users must be within three miles of a DSL-equipped central office.
Well, says Craig Felzien, that’s where SBC’s Project Pronto
comes in. The $6 billion initiative aims to expand DSL’s reach
by adding 4,000 “neighborhood broadband gateways” to its network
before 2001, and 18,000 by the end of 2002, he says.
“It entails placing new fiber optic cables, plus electronic
components,” says Felzien, Southwestern Bell’s external affairs
manager for St. Charles County and North St. Louis County. “Project
Pronto effectively pushes fiber optics deeper into the business
communities and neighborhoods we serve.”
SBC is providing 10 competitive local exchange carriers (among
the CLECs willing to be identified are Advanced Solutions Inc.,
Covad, @Link…even Birch Telecom, with its man-not-Bell’s best
friend mascot) access to this trial phase of Project Pronto.
Trial or not, it’s ambitious. Households and businesses to which
DSL is available will rise from 5.9 million at mid-2000 to 9.8
million by year-end. In the same timeframe, SBC is trying to
increase DSL subscribers to one million from 435,000.
Cable modems’ limitations, as weed-whacked neighbors might aver,
are different from DSL’s.
According to one telecom executive who insisted on anonymity,
“You’re getting reports from early users of cable modem, like
out in Silicon Valley, who used to be in love with it. But they’re
no longer getting the high-speed access. The trunk of the tree
[speaking analogously of cable’s requirement for a dedicated
connection back to the broadcast head end.] can’t handle the
demands of all the subscribers who are being attached to it.”
“I can’t speak to Silicon Valley,” replies Deb Seidel, regional
director of communications for AT&T Broadband, “but here we’re
getting positive feedback. If there is some slowing down, it’s
imperceptible, because the cable capacity is so great.
“The other thing is that we start with so-many-nodes-per-neighborhood,
based on our best estimates of what the usage will be in that
neighborhood,” she says. “If we see usage increase, we can split
a number of homes from that node and install another.”
Eventually AT&T @Work will roll out cable modem for businesses,
“again, with sufficient capacity and expandability that users
won’t notice any change in service just because it gets popular,”
she says.
Seidel says that currently AT&T is upgrading its cable network
with what’s called hybrid fiber coaxial: The main trunk is fiber.
In the neighborhood it’s coaxial.
“Coaxial can carry broadband for 2,000 feet before it needs
amplification,” she says, “so if we get it to the fiber optic
lines, we’re in good shape.”
She adds one more detail: “Broadband cable will be available
in 100 percent of the areas served by AT&T, and sooner rather
than later.” All the better, says John McCartan, director of
e-services at Solutech, a software and on-line consulting and
training company.
“From our perspective, once broadband is pervasive in residences,
it really will change how people work,” he says.
It will mean access to “corporate e-mail,” he says. Instead
of prosaic, old personal e-mails, employees can “work with large
Excel attachments, Power Point or Word documents attached.”
“People will take control of their lives,” McCartan notes. “They
can work at midnight at home [there’s luck!], if, say, they
left the office early to watch their daughter’s soccer game.”
Hmmm. Did broadband just pull wage slavery into the high-tech
realm? McCartan promises that “asynchronous transfer mode” will
protect employees from improper intrusions.
Meanwhile, Solutech is also working to make the most of wireless
broadband. Right now, you can pull down information that’s more
like Cliff Notes, McCartan says, “But not War and Peace.”
The day may be approaching when wireless joins the broadband
fracas with cable and DSL. “Sprint thinks it can do it. They’re
doing it in Arizona with ‘fixed antenna wireless.’ They say
St. Louis will be one of their early markets.”
St. Louisans may want to proceed carefully, if a burgeoning
use of wireless broadband in the region is accompanied by an
inexplicable marigold blight.
Kevin Kipp runs Bubble Communications, a creative services and
community relations firm in St. Charles.
