Continental bulks up with cable modems >BY Chris Bucholtz, West Coast Bureau Chief

In what the company described as a major first step toward rolling out commercial high-speed data services, Continental Cablevision Inc. has agreed to buy 50,000 cable modems from LANcity Corp. for its networks in New England, Florida and Illinois.

The agreement is the single largest contract for cable modems and follows Continental's use of LANcity Personal (LCP) cable modems in its Project Agora trial at Boston College and several other trials in the New England area.

"Project Agora was a significant endorsement of cable modem technology and had a lot to do with our decision," said a spokesman for Continental. "We've had the modems deployed for more than a year, and they've worked quite well. We still have a steep learning curve, but the technology works, and the consumers have been happy. That pointed us strongly in this direction."

Although bigger names, including Motorola, Hewlett-Packard and Zenith Electronics, have cable modem products on the market, Continental experience with LANcity has proved beneficial both for sales and development.

"The first thing the LANcity modems have going for them is that they work now," said Gary Kim, a senior vice president at Probe Research. "A lot of companies' modems have had delays in rollouts and problems with the return path, but Continental has been testing them for a year, and that's worked to LANcity's benefit."

"Many of the features of the LCP modems are based on joint field experiences in multiple pilot installations with Continental," said LANcity Chief Executive Officer Rouzbeh Yassini. "Ideas such as cable modem plug and play, quality-of-service provisioning, data encryption and enhanced network management are based on feedback that Continental has provided us."

Continental hopes to use the modems to transform its cable infrastructure in to a two-way data medium, carrying video, voice and data traffic and will start rollouts in 1997.