Dream on. Such a scenario may sound good, but making it happen requires an ultrahigh-speed Internet connection that few people have. As more and more people hook up to the World Wide Web from home, frustration over limitations on “bandwidth,” or line capacity, is mounting. Most people use 14,000-baud modems hooked to their phone lines. That’s fine for sending and retrieving plain text like electronic mail. But doing the same with graphics and sound at that speed is agonizingly slow. Full-motion video is impossible. Many exasperated Web surfers now log on after-hours from their offices, which often have high-speed Internet connections.
A wire many people already have in their homes–the lowly coaxial TV cable–could change all that. In a handful of trials around the country, cable companies are piping data into homes at unprecedented speeds. Because it carries data through the wide channels used for television, cable has the potential for moving data at 30 million bits per second. That’s thousands of times faster than twisted copper phone wire and hundreds of times faster than the phone companies’ high-capacity ISDN lines (Integrated Services Digital Network). If the cable companies’ pricing models are to be believed, costs will drop, too. At around $45 a month for unlimited use, cable connections will be cheaper than high-speed phone links. And the cable companies plan to compete directly with Internet providers like America Online, CompuServe and Netcom by including an Internet connection in their service. Forrester Research, Inc., predicts that by the end of the decade nearly 7 million households, using a device called a cable modem, will surf the Web using the same wires that pipe in HBO and the Home Shopping Network.
Superfast transmission speed is the good news. The bad news is that it’s the monopolistic cable companies, many of them newcomers to the online universe, who are bringing it. The ethos of the Internet is one of choice. If your cable provider is also your Internet access provider, the cable company is likely to want to control what you get, much as it does with cable programming. “If you use the phone lines to get to the Internet, you may be stuck with your local telco,” says Sharon Gillett, principal of Victory Research, a Watertown, Mass., consulting firm. “But through them you can still choose your Internet service provider.”
Having control of the pipe is handy. Time Warner, which is testing its Linerunner cable-modem service with 200 residents in Elmira, N.Y., conspicuously promotes the company’s books, magazines and other products. The Linerunner menu nudges users toward Pathfinder, Time Inc.’s own Web site. In fact, customers can’t get to the Web unless they go through Pathfinder first. Officials at Time Warner Cable defend the practice by pointing out that Pathfinder is one of the most popular sites on the Web.
Tele-Communications Inc., the nation’s No. 1 cable company, has formed @Home to build its own network to connect to the Internet nationwide. The company also plans to offer its service to other cable operators in non-TCI markets. @Home is planning to license Java, the hot new programming language intended for use over the Net. Using a Java application running over cable, @Home customers could have a continually updated stock portfolio scroll, ticker-tape fashion, across the bottom of their computer screen. @Home is also striking deals with multimedia firms to allow customers to download CD-ROMs directly into their computers instead of buying them at a store. Without the high bandwidth of cable, that would tie up your phone line for days.
Homes aren’t the only place where cable connections to cyberspace can make a difference. A year ago Ann Kitajima, a first-grade teacher at Walter Hays Elementary School in Palo Alto, Calif., shared a modem with 14 other teachers. She was frustrated by her molasseslike connection to the Web. Now that the school is in a cable-modem trial with Palo Alto’s Cable Co-op, each classroom has continuous access to pictures and graphics from the Web. “When you teach 6-year-olds,” says Kitajima, “it’s really important to get those graphics downloaded fast.” In preparation for a recent field trip to nearby tide pools, Kitajima’s class did a little homework first by visiting the home page of the marine biologist who was to be their host, which included his photograph. “When we got there, the kids recognized him at once.”
The move to cable-modem service has been slower than the cable companies had hoped. According to Paul Kagan Associates, Inc., only about 5 percent of the cable systems in the United States can handle two-way data transmissions. An additional 10 to 15 percent were built to be capable of two-way traffic, but aren’t yet. That means that most cable networks allow only “downstream” transmission into the home: there is no way for the user to send commands and other messages back to the Internet. Cable companies are upgrading their wiring with fiber-optic cable to allow for high-capacity “upstream” traffic, but the transition is slow and expensive. As a rule, even when a system is capable of two-way traffic, they send data downstream much faster than up.
Worldwide standards for cable modems are still being determined, and many of the companies building them still haven’t gone into mass production. Until that happens, cable modems will be expensive (they currently cost about $400), and customers will likely lease them, much as they do the set-top device for cable TV service. Will Hearst, @Home’s chief executive and grandson of the publishing legend William Randolph Hearst, made early predictions that @Home would have 1 million customers by the end of 1996. But the company recently backed away from those projections.
Perhaps the delays are a blessing. In the time it will take to work the kinks out, maybe the cable companies will have figured out what makes the Internet so popular: it’s a two-way street. Netizens may like to surf the Web, but they also want to run Web pages from their homes. They may want to download a video clip, but they’ll also want to upload one of their own. Ray Kiddy, a resident of Sunnyvale, Calif., where @Home plans to launch its service later this spring, says he is looking forward to the cable-modem service so that he can have videoconferences with people he works with in Tennessee, Israel and Japan. The cable modem, he says, will save him the cost of installing a new phone line. He’s just hoping that TCI will really deliver on its two-way promise. Will the cable companies get the message? If they want a piece of the Internet action, they’ll have to.
While most home Internet users now dial up over sluggish analog telephone lines, phone and cable companies are starting to offer high-speed alternatives.
Copper wire ISDN Coaxial phone line phone line cable SPEED 14.4kbs 128kbs 10,000kbs TIME TO DOWN- LOAD A ONE- MEGABYTE FILE[a] 9.7 minutes 66 seconds .8 second AVG. MONTHLY COST Same as $40 plus $45 flat rate[b] telephone usage USAGE 98% now use 6.7 mil- 6.9 million dial-up lion homes homes by the modems by the year year 2000[b] (speeds 2000[b] vary)
