Pity the poor beleaguered cable guy. Direct-broadcast satellites are eroding his turf from the air while the Baby Bells and the burgeoning Internet creep in over the phone system. Worse still, he faces this growing competition while trying to shake a public image only a bit more benign than Saddam Hussein's.
The cable empire is finally striking back. Its secret weapon: blisteringly fast access to the Internet, courtesy of the cable modem, an electronic gadget that connects computers to the outside world via cable-TV lines instead of phone lines. In the past two weeks, America's two largest cable operators, TCI and Time Warner, launched the nation's first commercial cable-modem services in Fremont, California, and Akron, Ohio, respectively. Time Warner built its own service, dubbed Road Runner (after Warner Bros.' lightning-speed cartoon character); TCI joined forces with a Silicon Valley start-up called @Home. The basic pitch, however, is the same: Net access at speeds hundreds of times faster than today's conventional modems.
It's a good pitch. Weary Netizens know all too well that browsing the World Wide Web these days is less like surfing than like crawling: data drips like molasses onto your computer screen, sometimes taking several minutes to create a single page of text and graphics. If you want to download, say, a 5-minute rock video, you'll have time to catch a quick meal--maybe even a movie--while the phone line churns away.
Your cable line, by contrast, has enough data-carrying capacity--or bandwidth--to deliver 60 or 70 channels of live video the instant you turn on the tube. It is, in high-tech parlance, a very fat "pipe"--some 300 times as fat as "twisted pair" copper phone lines. What if, the cable industry breathlessly asks, some of that bandwidth could be diverted to the Internet? How might entertainment and commerce--not to mention the industry's bottom line--be transformed?
It is to answer that question that the leading major U.S. cable operators are racing to become Internet providers. Today's media darling, @Home, which launched last year vowing to build the first national cable-modem network, has exclusive deals with TCI, Cox and Comcast. In addition to its Fremont service, it is readying rollouts with TCI in Hartford, Connecticut, and Arlington, Illinois; Cox in Orange County, California; and Comcast in Baltimore, Maryland. "We're in a frenzy," says CEO Tom Jermoluk. "We've got 20 or 30 cities going online. We'll reach hundreds of thousands of homes very shortly."
Time Warner's Road Runner service, which began as a small trial in Elmira, New York, is available to 300,000 homes in Akron and neighboring Canton, Ohio, and is set to expand in Elmira and Corning, New York, this year, and to San Diego soon after.
The price, for those already paying for Internet access, is probably right. Net users pay at least $20 a month for bare-bones access, and users of commercial online services, which charge by the hour, can rack up huge monthly bills. Cable modems, for about $35 a month, not only deliver dramatically faster performance, but also, like cable TV, are "on" 24 hours a day with no extra-usage charge. Time Warner Cable president Glenn Britt says the Akron rollout has a waiting list 1,800 names long.