Continental burns Highway1 rubber

Continental Cablevision last week seized the market initiative by becoming the first multiple systems operator to use one-way cable modems in a commercial deployment.

The Highway1 rollout in Jacksonville, Fla., is the second phase of a three-part Internet access plan. Continental already offers a dial-up Internet access service over standard telephone modems. Highway1 lets customers subscribe to a cable modem service using General Instrument's SURFboard cable modems with telephony return. Later this year, when Continental finishes upgrading its network, Jacksonville residents will also receive Internet access via a two-way cable modem.

"We want to provide customers with something faster than what they have, and the one-way approach lets us do that quickly," said a Continental spokesman.

Continental is going one-way because it realizes that it will take time to fully upgrade its networks to bidirectional, said John Aronsohn, senior analyst at The Yankee Group, Boston. "They figure it's better to make some revenue now over a somewhat inferior service than to lose that opportunity altogether."

Continental also rolled out a cable modem service in Boston last week using bidirectional modems from LANcity. More than 200 residential customers now receive Highway1 service, and Continental expects to extend access to 225,000 homes in New England by the end of the year. The MSO has been partnering a marketing and technical trial with Internet backbone company BBN Planet in the Boston suburbs for the last six months.

The MSO plans a November rollout of the two-way Highway1 service in the Detroit region-an area where Ameritech has focused its energies on building hybrid fiber/coax cable TV networks.