Dickensian reflections

It is the fastest of times, it is the slowest of times. If I begin a bit literary this month, blame it on El Nino, which has been dumping rain on us constantly since Thanksgiving. There's not much to do but wait out the rain with a good book and a mug of hot chocolate. My choice was Charles Dickens.

Hearing the telecom news these past few weeks, I can't help but think were Dickens alive, he'd find today's high-tech concerns over the Internet a pathos equal to his stories of hungry commoners, greedy businessmen and revolutionary upstarts.

Just take a look at what's going on with Internet access. On the surface, you might think that peace is breaking out all over. But like any good Dickens story, things are not as they appear.

First, after more than a year of bickering over different (and incompatible) 56 kb/s modems, it appears we're about to get a standard.

Modem makers Lucent Technologies, 3Com, Hayes and Texas Instruments have laid down their swords and agreed on a common way to speed up modems (see story on page 54). The V.90 technology even is being endorsed by PC heavyweights such as Compaq, Dell and Hewlett-Packard.

The 56 kb/s market has suffered from its own inability to standardize a common technology, so modem makers bruised by more than a year of disappointing sales seem poised to rush out the technology ASAP.

Some vendors even hint that we'll see the first V.90 users in March.

Hold on. We may not be out of the woods yet. I'm still not clear about how "standard" the new standard will be. There's already talk that "compatibility tests" to make sure the new versions of V.90 modems will work with each other (isn't that the point of a single standard?) are still months from completion.

And then there's digital subscriber line.

You've no doubt read much, including in Telephony, about the massive love fest among telephone companies and PC makers to standardize DSL techniques. As I wrote last summer, there were as many as a dozen different flavors of DSL, including the approaches used to extend distances and work with ISDN, Ethernet and T-1 access devices.

The focus of the Universal ADSL Working Group, which includes the Internet Dream Team of the Bell regional holding companies, Microsoft and Intel, is splitterless DSL. Find a way to cut the cost of installing splitters, the devices that help telcos separate their voice and data traffic, and you're well on your way to widescale deployment of lower-cost DSL. At least so goes the logic.

To read the press releases from UAWG, you'd think that here, too, mega-speed DSL finally is going to roll out fast and everywhere. But dig a little deeper and you find that there is little will-or money-going into the splitterless DSL project. At least for now.

But don't take my word for it. Look at U S West. It has been going full bore on its existing DSL rollout with existing DSL technologies. U S West's MegaBit Services will roll out in almost 40 cities this year, offering speeds up to 7 Mb/s-three to four times faster than conventional T-1 lines. But a prospective customer not living within a mile or so of a central office or switching station may just get an invitation to a waiting list.

John Hunter, the new editor of "The TeleChoice Report on xDSL," puts the picture in starker terms. "In the wake of the telecommunications act, DSL is really No. 3 on the list of priorities for [RHCs]," he said. "First there's long-distance, and then there's keeping other telcos out of their home turf. ADSL, for most of these guys, is a distant third."

So what are the prospects for faster and cheaper Internet access? Hunter doesn't expect much change by Christmas. "If you're close to a central office, you may have a DSL option from one or two [RHCs]," he said.

All the while, the hapless consumers, like so many Oliver Twists, are still hungry for more bandwidth and faster speeds. "Please, sirs, we want some more."