Net Firm to Ask FCC to Open Cable Lines

A small California Internet company is poised to open a new legal front today in the war to bring high-speed Web access to homeowners via their cable television lines.

In a petition sources say will be filed today before the Federal Communications Commission, Redondo Beach-based Internet Ventures Inc. contends that cable operators should be required to carry independent Internet services on their systems under the same rules that require them to offer subscribers all local broadcast channels.

The so-called “must-carry” provisions of federal communications laws have never before been interpreted to apply to Internet service providers. But IVI executives argue that the technical quality of Internet content today, including full-motion video, is so close to broadcast television that the distinction should be disregarded.

Some telecommunications experts say that the novel argument may have some merit.

“It’s an interesting argument for which there’s no set answer,” said Barbara Esbin, a former FCC lawyer now in private practice in Washington. She noted that the ambiguity in the laws is the result of their having been written long before the Internet became a commercial phenomenon.

IVI currently provides Web service to about 30,000 subscribers over conventional phone lines and 1,700 using a hybrid system in which customers receive Web data over cable TV lines but send commands to the network over telephone lines.

The company’s FCC petition involves the most contentious issue in the cable industry: whether cable operators will be able to control the provision of high-speed Internet services to their customers over their own lines.

Cable officials say such control is essential to enable them to recoup the billions of dollars they are spending to upgrade their networks to accommodate two-way data communications.

But Internet providers, led by America Online, say the cable industry is threatening to establish a new monopoly over a lucrative and socially important medium.

IVI, moreover, contends that the expensive upgrades undertaken by cable operators are not necessary for their hybrid service, which utilizes conventional telephone lines for less demanding portions of the Internet data loop.

At issue in the fight is the right to deliver broadband communications to home and office computer users. Many experts believe this high-speed, high-capacity technology would encourage explosive growth in the Internet by giving subscribers access to TV-quality video, movies and a vast array of other content and services.

Thus far, however, the roll-out of broadband by cable and telephone companies has been painfully slow, in part because upgrading cable and phone networks to accommodate the necessary two-way communications is very costly.

Cable operators have sought to recover these costs by allowing customers to sign up for Internet access only via their own Internet service providers--@Home, which is owned by AT&T; and several other cable systems, and Road Runner, which is jointly owned by Time Warner Cable and MediaOne Group.

This has effectively blocked other Internet companies, including AOL, from offering high-speed service to subscribers via cable wires--the most technically efficient media for broadband communications.

AOL and other Internet providers have asked the FCC to order the cable industry to regulate the cable companies as though they are telephone companies--as “common carriers” required to provide communications access to all. Thus far, the FCC has turned them down.

IVI bases its alternative approach on its own unusual technology. While most broadband providers require high-speed connections in both directions between the user and the Internet provider, IVI relies on a hybrid system that would use cable lines to download material to a user’s computer, but rely on conventional telephone lines to upload commands to the Internet.

The process works because for most users the data demand of Internet use is asymmetrical--the uploading of computer commands places much less demand on the data circuit than the downloading of images and content from the Web.

IVI said that conventional cable lines are adequate to handle the downloading of Web content. For the most part, however, cable operators have refused to allow the company to lease channel space to provide the service to subscribers.