Standards on High-Speed Net Service May Set U.S. Pattern
In response to widespread discontent over the quality of high-speed Internet service provided by AT&T;, the Fremont City Council was expected Tuesday night to adopt detailed new standards that could set a national pattern.
The closely watched action, in which the Bay Area city was considering regulations for @Home high-speed Internet access, was stimulated by service outages that have made Fremont a kind of poster child for the challenges that cable companies face in transforming aging television infrastructures into sophisticated, two-way data networks.
The rules would require AT&T; Broadband Interactive Services to adhere to the same service requirements that apply to cable TV, but they fall short of regulating the speed at which Internet images and files must be transferred to a subscriber’s computer--a key concern among users.
Although Los Angeles has already adopted similar requirements, Fremont’s approach has been watched by municipalities and cable operators because the community was selected about three years ago for @Home’s first commercial roll-out and was considered a showcase for the entry of cable into the Internet age.
AT&T; is monopoly holder of the local cable franchise and sole provider of @Home access in Fremont, which it provides in partnership with Excite@Home Corp. As a result, it is subject to city regulation.
The proposal before the council was developed by an advisory committee that included both AT&T; representatives and @Home customers. AT&T; would be required to offer the same standard of service for its cable-based Internet product as it does for cable television. That includes a guarantee that 90% of support calls would be answered within 30 seconds and that 95% of all repairs for problems involving the loss of service would be completed within 24 hours.
“It makes some logical sense,” AT&T; spokesman Andrew Johnson said. “We treat the data product as part of video offerings.”
In addition to frequent service outages, Fremont subscribers have faced extremely long waits for service calls and regular slowdowns in the speed at which World Wide Web pages and data files download from the Internet to a subscriber’s computer. Many subscribers found the speed problem particularly frustrating because it was @Home’s critical selling point.
However, the proposed rules do not cover access speed.
“There would be problems with measurability and enforceability. The speed of downloading depends on a lot of different things, some of which are in the control of the cable operator, some of which aren’t,” said Dan Schoenholz, the city’s administrative analyst who worked with the committee to draft the proposed guidelines.
Schoenholz added that a competing high-speed access technology, known as digital subscriber lines, or DSL, has recently become available to Fremont residents, and offers a competitive hedge against complacency by AT&T.;
Dan Calic, founder of the local @Home users group and a member of the advisory committee, said AT&T; would not guarantee a specific level of performance but has agreed in principle to a plan in which an independent third party would randomly test the system’s speed and report the results to users and the city.
The data would serve as a way of advising subscribers about what performance they can realistically expect, Calic said.
But in a sign that communications between the company and its customers may still be out of sync, Johnson said AT&T; would not permit any independent testing of its network. The company will share its own performance data with the users group “informally” but expects any such data to remain private, he added.
