A brave new world

ISPs wary of broadband's built-in advantage Broadband data delivery has so much potential that ISPs that built their business on dial-up access are worried they won't be there when the market explodes.

"It's a damned shame that people in this room who built the Internet may not get a chance to play in it now that it's becoming so popular," complained Gene Crick, executive director of the Texas Internet Service Providers Association.

Stephen Heins, director of marketing at NorthNet, and David Robertson, general manager of STIC.net, joined Crick in urging a sparse ISPCon crowd in San Jose to get active in persuading the FCC to open access to cable networks - starting with the proposed AOL/Time Warner merger.

The panelists, anticipating the Federal Trade Commission's merger approval, outlined strategies to coerce the FCC into favoring open access by its Dec. 27 deadline for comments.

"We've acted as midwives and nannies to two generations of Internet users," Heins said, suggesting that the FCC would support open access "if they are shamed enough."

The process already started, Robertson said, noting that the FCC "may not have a really big clue about what to do, but they have enough sense to ask questions." ISPs, he said, should answer the questions."If we stick our heads in the sand right now for just a few minutes, the train's going to leave the station," he predicted.

Robertson told the audience that half their subscribers will abandon dial-up service by 2004. "You either convert them, or they go over to the competition," he said.

On Heins' home turf in Wisconsin, Road Runner cable modems are drawing two subscribers per day from dial-ups, he said. Especially foreboding is that the subscribers are drawn to broadband's potential for "video streaming and all those things coming down the pike," Heins said.

Crick agreed: "Cable folks are enormously interested in the market to come. They don't want you as competitors."

The three panelists dismissed DSL as a potential cable competitor. "Cable has a much wider footprint than DSL has for years to come," Crick said.

Heins called DSL a "second-rate technology vs. cable" and said "the Godzilla right now is AOL/Time Warner."

Crick conceded that cable operators built the private networks and financed the growth of high-speed broadband over them and believes they will use that argument to give their favored providers, Road Runner and Excite@Home, an advantage.

"Give me the same terms - truly the same terms - that they're giving their access providers, then we're on the way to a harmonious solution," he said.

It's important to hammer these points home to the FCC because cable already is drawing early adopters and getting a surge from its high-speed data services, they said.

"The new high-speed offering has invigorated all of cable TV," Heins said."Cable is the only hit in town right now."

And it's a seductive one.

"This is a drug - consumers are going to put up with anything to get that speed," Robertson said.

Certainly the vendors and service providers were getting juiced as they reviewed high-speed networks' ability to deliver enhanced services.

"Broadband is huge," said Adrian Rowland, director of Internet marketing for Micromuse, a network management provider. "It's the largest market for us in terms of the access market."

Rowland predicted a 400% growth rate in DSL and cable modem installations for his company's network management service, especially as companies use more bandwidth for enhanced services.

"There really is no value to [straight-forward] Internet access any more," he said, emphasizing that service providers must be able to monitor quality of service across a series of services they are offering. "We try to monitor quality of service. We give them visibility of all those components. We give them the view into the network performance."

The IP network is still linked to the public network for voice, said Robert Brakeman, developer program manager for Quicknet Technologies, which offers a front-end technology to enable ISPs to become Internet telephony service providers.

"We get rid of echo, get rid of latency and increase that to what you would expect from a traditional toll call," he said.

But they don't get rid of the public network, with which Quicknet's front-end gear connects dial-up ISPs' networks. That will change, though, as broadband services mature and move voice over the entire Internet, Brakeman said. Eventually, pure voice-over-IP networks will be developed, freeing ISPs from the local loop and the public network, he said.

"Why this is really getting to be such a big industry is cable access and DSL."