WIRED FOR SPEED : Getting Online Can Be Maddeningly Slow, but Two Technologies Are Racing to Change That

Ellen Sullivan, Malibu resident and Internet novice, is enjoying her first forays into cyberspace, making friends in the America Online chat rooms and surfing the colorful portion of the Internet known as the World Wide Web. But she has one big complaint: “Too often, AOL is AWOL--America Waiting Online--because it takes forever to get this stuff.”

She’s hardly alone in her frustration. Although many who access the Internet at work or school enjoy special high-speed connections, just about anyone who uses a dial telephone line to get online quickly realizes that the vaunted global computer network--and especially the World Wide Web--has a serious speed problem.

Plain old text is not an issue, but viewing pictures or graphics--or retrieving files that contain sounds or images--often involves a painful wait of several minutes or more, even with the latest 28.8-kilobit-per-second computer modems. So tedious can the process become, in fact, that some believe it could abruptly short-circuit the Internet craze. And most experts believe traditional modems have reached their speed limits.

Fortunately, both the cable television industry and the telephone industry have promising solutions to this problem. Cable companies aim to use their high-capacity television cables to offer Internet access at speeds hundreds of times faster than a 28.8 modem--speed that could transform the very nature of the online world. And telephone companies have developed a high-speed data service known as ISDN, or Integrated Services Digital Network, that uses regular telephone lines.

But the cable companies are several years away from having a broadly available service, and in many parts of the country it could take much longer than that. The cable modems that will transmit and receive the data are still under development, and most local cable operators will have to undertake expensive upgrades of their basic facilities to offer the service.

Telephone companies, many of which already offer ISDN service, have displayed a baffling lack of interest in pushing it aggressively. Several phone companies, including Pacific Bell, have infuriated customers and computer companies by seeking big rate increases for ISDN service just when it was starting to catch on. And ISDN offers a much more modest speed improvement than do cable modems, leading some to believe it will be outdated before it reaches a wide audience.

“There are some variations among the providers, but overall they just haven’t marketed ISDN aggressively,” said Peter Krasilovsky, a consultant with Arlen Communications in Bethesda, Md. “They don’t seem to be deeply committed to it and are looking at several other technologies for high-speed data services.”

Publicly, of course, the cable companies and the telephone companies present a more optimistic picture. In the cable industry, high-speed Internet access has replaced interactive television as the big opportunity of the future, and a raft of trials are now underway across the country. Cable operators have placed orders for about a million cable modems--lured by the possibility of giving their customers instantaneous access to videos, pictures and sounds that would now take many minutes to crawl through a phone line.

Cable modems, indeed, would open the way for what some call Web TV--a whole new genre of online programming featuring TV-quality video, virtual reality games and other services.

Cox Cable in San Diego was among the first cable systems to launch a cable modem trial; it began offering 200 users of the Prodigy online service high-speed access two years ago. Based on a positive response, Cox is now rebuilding its network for advanced services--at a cost of $300 million.

Meanwhile, in the Silicon Valley city of Sunnyvale, cable giant Tele-Communications Inc. is launching an ambitious Internet-over-cable trial in conjunction with @Home, a start-up company it helped finance. By building its own network of big computers to house and distribute information, @Home aims to offer high-speed access to the Internet, and really high-speed access to information and entertainment programming that’s on the @Home computers.

“You can’t solve the speed problem by just connecting a high-speed modem to the cable and then dialing up to a local Internet service provider,” explained Milo Medine, a vice president at @Home, which was founded by publishing scion William Randolph Hearst III. “The bottleneck is in the ISP and sometimes in the Internet itself.”

But upgrading networks all across the country will be an expensive proposition for the cable operators. According to a recent report by Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research, the upgrade will cost between $175 and $250 per subscriber. Moreover, cable companies have little experience with the complicated billing and maintenance issues that arise with complex data services. And the cable modems are likely to be expensive--in the $300 to $500 range.

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Further, analysts note, the speed claims made on behalf of cable modems are suspect. In principle, they can provide Internet access at a blinding 10 megabits per second--about 350 times faster than a 28.8 modem. But because the Internet circuits on a cable will be shared by many users, the actual speed is likely to be slower when there are many people online. Most Word Wide Web sites and many parts of the Internet network operate far more slowly than 10 megabits anyway, limiting the advantages of such high-speed access.

Emily Green, a Forrester analyst, expects cable companies to emerge as the primary providers of high-speed net access. Still, she forecasts that by 2000, just 7% of all Internet subscribers will be getting online via cable.

“It’s an aggressive prediction, but only about half of what the industry is claiming,” Green said. “And if cable companies don’t get financing or their pace of rebuilding slows down, then the projections would change.”

The telephone companies, for their part, are much further along. ISDN was developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, long before most people had even heard of the Internet, and it is now widely available in many areas, including much of California. Its speed advantage is much less dramatic than that of a cable modem--an ISDN line can provide Internet access at 128 kbps, less than five times faster than a 28.8-kbps modem--but that speed is assured at all times.

“ISDN is growing rapidly and becoming increasingly important,” said Hemant Vaidya, Pacific Bell’s marketing vice president for data and video services.

Yet analysts and consumers alike are wondering about the telephone companies’ commitment.

Pacific Bell and some other regional telephone companies, rather than pricing the service aggressively in order to steal a march on the cable companies, have instead been seeking big rate increases.

Pacific Bell late last year asked the California Public Utilities Commission for permission to charge $125 for installation and about $173.88 for 100 hours of service, as opposed to free installation and the $63.62 per month for 100 hours that it charges today. (GTE charges $88.10 for installation and about $130 per month for 100 hours.)

The phone companies contend rate hikes are necessary to cover the cost of actually providing the service, which has been higher than anticipated because Internet users spend a lot more time online than expected--thus requiring additional investment in facilities. But the proposed pricing changes have infuriated users, and a coalition of computer and communications equipment companies--led by Intel and Motorola--has even weighed in to protest the move.

“PC communication is driving demand for Pentium computers, and one thing that takes away the joy of the Internet experience is lack of speed,” said Druv Khanna, a senior attorney at Intel, maker of the Pentium microprocessor. “We see the need for more bandwidth at a mass-market price point.” Intel, Motorola, Compaq Computer and Philips Electronic have joined forces to challenge the ISDN rate increases before state public utility commissions in New Mexico, Arizona, Washington and California.

Some suspect the phone companies may be dragging their feet on ISDN because they’d prefer to jump directly to a faster technology known as ADSL.

And skeptics say consumers shouldn’t hold their breath for any of this. “Dedicated access over phone lines, using 28.8 modems, will continue for a long time,” said Krasilovsky of Arlen Communications. When speed does happen, though, many will find their Internet experience transformed.

Freelance writer Joan Van Tassel can be reached by e-mail at joanvt@earthlink.net.

For Faster Internet Access ...

As business and consumers jump onto the Internet in large numbers, many are discovering the Achilles’ heelof the global computer network: It’s slow, at least when used with a conventional dial-up modem. Phone and cable companbies are racing to solve this problem with two very different forms of high-speed Internet access.

ISDN JAccess

Many telephone companies are promoting a service known as ISDN, for Integrated Services Digital Network.

1. After checking the customers’s line to make sure it’s in good enough shape for ISDN, the phone company installs a special circuit card in its central office for the new line. Shown at left, a Pacific Bell “line card” used in the ISDN switch system.

2. The customer buys an ISDN modem and plugs it into his or her personal computer. The customer must also subscribe to a high-speed Internet access service.

3. When the service is activated, the line is capable of carrying two channels that operate at 56 kilobits per second and an additinal channel operating at 16 kpbs. They can be combined into a single 128-kpbs data channel.

Cable Access

Cable companies are working on a solution using a new technology known as cable modems.

1. The cable company must first install additional amplifiers and other equipment to give its system two-way communicatins capability. A portion of the system will then be devoted to Internet traffic. Pictured at left is Cos Cable’s high-speed network interface in San Diego.

2. Customers will either purchase a cable modem or rent it from their cable company. The cable will go to a box with two outlets, one for the traditional cable TV box and another for the cable modem.

3. Once installed, the cable modem service will yield Internet access as fast as 4 megabits per second, in some cases as fast as 10 megabits. But the speed will depend on how many people are using the system.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

A Pace Primer

ISDN and cable modems dramatically increase data transmission speeds:

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Dial-up ISDN Cable 4 14.4 kbps* 56 kbps* 4 mbps** SIMPLE IMAGE 2.3 35.7 0.5 2 megabytes minutes seconds seconds COMPLEX IMAGE 18.5 4.8 4 16 megabytes minutes minutes seconds SHORT ANIMATION/VIDEO 1.4 21.5 18 72 megabytes hours minutes seconds LONG ANIMATION/VIDEO 3.5 21.4 18 4.3 gigabytes days hours minutes

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* Kilobits per second

** Megabits per second

Source: Forrester Research Inc.