PUMPING DIESEL FUEL INTO DSL

BellSouth calls it a “turbo button.” It's literally a button on the computer desktop that will trigger the virtual throttle on a BellSouth DSL customer's bandwidth, causing an ambling 256 kb/s service to leap to speeds of at least 5 Mb/s.

That's a lot of power under the hood. So far BellSouth has done only dry runs of its new bandwidth-on-demand technology in the safety of its labs, but Chief Technology Officer Bill Smith thinks it's ready for the street. BellSouth is now planning its first trials among a large cross-section of end users, and from there the Bell company will develop its deployment plan. Basically, BellSouth knows the technology works, but Smith needs to figure how its customers want to use it.

“We have some solid views on how we think customers want to use this technology, but there's only so much I can give away to our competition,” Smith said. “We've done a lot of market research, and we think our customers will find certain things about the service very popular. Ultimately this will all be proved in the trials.”

BellSouth has been gearing up for bandwidth-on-demand for some time. Most of its DSL deployments have been through fiber-fed remote terminals, significantly shortening local loop lengths. BellSouth can get 3 Mb/s of capacity to 80% of its DSL footprint, Smith said, and the carrier has the capability of jacking up that capacity to 5 Mb/s to 50% or 60% of the same addressable market.

BellSouth also is testing ADSL2 and ADSL2+ technologies and exploring different copper-pair bonding technologies to connect customers at the extreme end of the copper loop.

“We believe we can eventually get 10 Mb/s to the vast majority of our customers,” Smith said. “To some customers we might be able to go as high as 24 Mb/s.”

Gearing up the network to take extraordinary amounts of data isn't the difficult part, Smith said. The difficulty is getting customers to use it. Therein lies the logic of bandwidth-on-demand. There are applications that require extremely robust connections. But customers don't use them all the time, and any many cases aren't aware of them. Most consumers certainly aren't going to justify the cost of super-high capacity connection each month to download the occasional movie or initiate an online gaming session, but they might be willing to shell out a few bucks a couple of times a month to temporarily open up a larger pipe for said content, Smith said.

Oddly enough, market research in Europe where broadband-on-demand is available on some networks show that customers tend to pay as much or more monthly for a lower-speed connection with the occasional capacity boost than the customers who pay a high monthly subscription fee for a dedicated high-speed line, Smith said.

“The critical factor is the degree of control the customer has,” he said.

BellSouth is considering several business models for marketing the service. One would be to offer it directly as a client on customers' desktops, allowing them to order high bandwidth for a set duration. Another model would sell services that had bandwidth-boosts built in, such as movie downloads. Ordering a movie from a BellSouth partner like MovieLink would automatically initiate the highest capacity available over the DSL line for the duration of the download. But BellSouth still needs to answer some questions regarding its trial. It has to weigh how transparent the service should be to its customers. Most likely, BellSouth will find it has to be completely transparent, said Michael Goodman, ISP analyst for The Yankee Group.

“The benefit doesn't come from selling a bandwidth-on-demand service,” Goodman said. “Few people would even get the concept if you tried to market it to them. The benefit comes from being able to download your movie faster. The technology or bandwidth behind, customers could care less about.”