By KATHERINE PETERSEN
At least five months behind schedule, TCI Cablevision officials say their much-trumpeted plan to provide access to the Internet via cable lines will be ready this fall.
Modem difficulties delayed the project's scheduled April launch, but the @Home Network has switched from modem-maker Motorola Multimedia Group to LANcity, and is testing the technology in Sunnyvale, said Amy Bonetti, an @Home spokeswoman.
"We have over 100 people testing right now. We're just not talking about it yet. We'll keep adding people until we launch in Sunnyvale in late summer or early fall," Bonetti said.
Shawn Hernandez, Sunnyvale's director of information technology, said problems with cable modems are not unusual because it takes a special modem to communicate over both fiber optic and coaxial cable lines.
"To the best of my knowledge, they are proceeding as if it's going to happen," he said.
@Home has also developed its own mini-Internet, so once a customer has downloaded a file, the next customer can download the same file in much less time because it will be cached in the @Home system, Bonetti said.
Sunnyvale was chosen as a launch site for @Home because of its proximity to a main Internet access point, the Ames Research Center, and its computer-savvy residents. TCI currently has about 25,000 cable subscribers in Sunnyvale, which has a population of about 124,000 and a median income of $50,000.
Residents who purchase the $30-per-month service will receive a cable modem to attach to their computers. The modem will give them access to the Internet and a variety of online services, including the World Wide Web, provided by @Home Network of Palo Alto.
The cable modem is part of an emerging technology that provides faster Internet access and information transfer, 500 times faster than standard telephone wiring, said Bruce Dinger, a TCI Cablevision spokesman. Standard telephone wiring moves data at 28,800 bits per second, or a page of text every second.
However, transmitting more detailed information, with color and graphics, takes much longer. It takes 20 minutes to transfer one minute of a movie through telephone wires. With the cable modem, the movie could be transferred through cable wires to a computer screen at 10 million bits per second (about 2.4 seconds for one minute of movie time).
Yet @Home's delay may have given companies such as Pacific Bell time to jump into the fray with new technology, said Eileen Healy, director and principal analyst for public networks at Dataquest in San Jose.
"I think the announcement of the @Home services allowed the other services, such as Pac Bell, to get started on Asymmetric Digital Subscriber lines (ASDL), that runs at 1.5 million bits per second," she said. She added that ISDN modems, which can transmit at 128,000 bits per second, could grab a larger chunk of the market share until TCI's service becomes available.
"It's more real now. There aren't any other alternatives," she said.
This article appeared in the Sunnyvale Sun, July 24, 1996.
©1996 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.