RICK DAHMS
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REMEMBER WHEN just getting an e-mail was exciting? When logging onto a Web site and watching the image appear pixel by pixel was thrill enough to keep you at your monitor for hours? Been a while since you felt that way, hasn't it? But if a curious mix of corporate competitors great and small have their way with you, the Internet may soon be fun again.
Alternatives to the slug-speed dial-up Internet connection have actually been around for the better part of a decade, but for all but the most passionate surfers, they've been too technically demanding, too expensive to install, and too damn much trouble to get up and running. That's changing—not quickly, but fast enough that by the end of this year, a significant number of Websters will have shucked their old analog modems for a high-speed link to the Internet via fiber-optic cable, digital subscriber line (DSL), even satellite or wireless technology, at a comparable or better price per byte to what they're paying now, and (sometimes) greater reliability as well.
One reason people are getting more willing to take the high-speed plunge is that big names in the telecom field are starting to sell such service to the masses. Recently AT&T, which last year bought TCI's nation-spanning cable TV system, started offering Pugetopolitans low, low monthly rates and cut-rate installation and hardware to get new subscribers for its branded cable-modem system ATT@home.
Local phone companies can provide a similar service called "digital subscriber line," though up to now they haven't exactly gone out of their way to tell anyone about it. But if you call your US West (or GTE or whoever) customer service office, the operator may cautiously acknowledge that if you live in certain service areas, your telco might be willing to set you up with high-speed Internet access—sometime, for a rather stiff price, if asked nicely.
The only reason they've gotten that accommodating is that, thanks to an unintended consequence of the federal Telecommunications Act of 1996, a number of feisty new players are invading the telcos' turf to offer DSL service—cheaper, better, and with a human face.
WHICH TECHNOLOGY serves the customer better? At first glance, there seems to be no contest. Cable systems operate at light speed along the same fiber-optic line that already carries a bazillion bytes of digital TV through your neighborhood; DSL depends on a pair of twisted copper wires installed and maintained by—shudder—the phone company, the same kind of line that limits your current modem to a beggarly 56 kilobytes per second throughput. Cable can pump data at speeds verging on 1.5 megabytes per second; most home DSL systems deliver at only half that rate, and, if the distance from the telco central office to your house is more than a few miles, don't deliver at all.
But this time out, old technology has some hidden advantages over new. Cable can shoot you data at a meg-and-a-half per second—if you're the only person receiving on the channel. But as soon as anyone else on the same line starts up- or downloading, your share of the pipeline shrinks in proportion. It's like taking a shower in an old house: If enough other people turn on a tap, the flow in your stall can drop to a dribble. The only way your cable company can cut the congestion is to cut the number of users per "node": the box somewhere in your neighborhood where copper co-ax lines from up to a thousand cable households meet the fiber-optic spine of the system. Installing a new node is laborious and expensive, so the cable service provider has a financial incentive to load as many new customers as possible on each one, while keeping existing customers from getting too irritated by the constantly diminishing levels of service. When a new node is installed, relief is temporary, because the new "bandwidth" immediately starts filling up in its turn.
DSL providers (and users) don't face this dilemma. Once you have a functioning DSL line to your location, it is yours: Whatever its rated capacity—384 kilobytes per second and up—you won't sit down to surf one morning to discover your home-page takes a minute and a half to load because everybody else on the block is doing the same thing.
The biggest impediment to a mass market for DSL has been the phone company itself. DSL technology has been around since the 1980s, when a Bell Labs scientist figured out how to send megabytes of data over a humble copper phone line. But by the time the bugs had been worked out of a consumer version of DSL, the phone companies were making a bundle by providing high-speed T-1 data lines (same principle, different technology) to business, and saw no reason to promote DSL, which could only cut into their existing high-speed business.
Enter Congress, with the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which required the Baby Bells to allow competitors to sell local phone service. There was no way for a newcomer to compete profitably with the big kids in providing standard phone service. But DSL was something else: US West and its ilk found themselves bound by law to lease phone lines to upstart companies like Northpoint and Covad, so that Covad and Northpoint could in turn lease said lines to customers tired of waiting for the biggies to sell them high-speed Internet connections.
