Culver City to Get Cable Modem
On Tuesday, Culver City will be invited to join the elite club of Netizens who can access the Information Superhighway by way of high-speed cable modems.
MediaOne, the cable company that serves communities from Santa Monica to San Pedro and east to Pomona and Riverside County, will begin offering its MediaOne Express service to Culver City homes. By early next year, Boston-based MediaOne (formerly Continental Cablevision) plans to make the service available to all of its 340,000 customers in the L.A. area.
MediaOne Express provides an Internet linkup that is 50 times faster than the connection from a standard 28.8-kilobytes-per-second modem and 12 times faster than an ISDN connection.
That speed will transform the “World Wide Wait” into a “fat pipe” that can digest video as quickly as telephone modems download text, said Jeremy Stern, vice president of corporate and legal affairs for MediaOne in California.
MediaOne executives at the company’s regional office in El Segundo say that speed will change the way people use the Internet. Graphics-rich sites--especially video games--that were once avoided in the interest of time will become popular, and downloading software directly from Web sites will become more common, they say. The newly available speed could also give a boost to videoconferencing and telecommuting, they said.
Early returns from users of another cable modem service offered by Charter Communications and Earthlink Network in Pasadena support those expectations.
“Their entire usage pattern has changed,” said David Hausman, director of new product development for Charter in Alhambra. “Now they’re doing audio files, live video files and videoconferences. It’s opened up a whole new door as to why someone would have the Internet.”
Culver City beta tester Pam Cohen said “the difference is like night and day. Cable is just the obvious way to go.”
But despite the high-speed claims, cable modems can’t guarantee a zippy Internet experience, said Lisa Pelgrim, a senior analyst for modem technologies at Dataquest in San Jose.
“You can run into other congestion areas on the Internet, like if the server you’re calling into is busy,” she said. “You’re opening up your onramp, but if the highway’s crowded then it doesn’t really matter--you’re still stuck.”
MediaOne executives acknowledge that many Web sites won’t improve much when accessed via cable modem. For example, a video clip shown during a demonstration still appeared jerky, although it was better than standard fare.
Scott Tolleson, another MediaOne vice president, said the company is working with content developers to create Web applications that can take better advantage of the expanded capacity.
Not all beta testers are enamored with MediaOne Express. Bruce Kaplan said he can use the service for only two minutes before it “slows to a crawl.” But Kaplan, who is general manager of a multimedia firm, is familiar with the technical bugs that can arise during a trial. In his mind, “the customer service by far is a bigger problem.”
MediaOne Express will cost $49.95 a month (subscribers to the company’s cable television service get a $10 discount), plus $150 to $200 more in installation and equipment charges. The service already claims more than 10,000 customers in Boston, Atlanta, Detroit and Jacksonville, Fla.
