DSL makes its mark

U S West's split of its telephone and cable TV businesses into two companies last week hammered the final nail deeper into the coffin of the once-heralded convergence of telecommunications and cable TV.

That was just the beginning. Two days after the announcement, U S West launched the industry's first-and long-awaited-large-scale commercial digital subscriber line service. Ground zero is Phoenix, where Cox Communications happens to be providing cable modem service and plans to offer telephony to residents within six months.

Analysts who watched the DSL demonstration at the Phoenix Convention Center couldn't help but express envy of the customers who now benefit from the choice of high-speed Internet access technologies, not to mention hand-holding service technicians who make home visits.

>From an internal viewpoint, the deployment tremendously boosts DSL as the high-speed technology of choice. In fact, U S West's MegaBit Services give end users always-on access to the Internet with no dial-up required. The service offerings range from 192 kb/s access for recreational Internet users to 320 kb/s for small offices and 704 kb/s for serious cybersurfers.

It looks like carriers learned some lessons from ISDN rollouts. But the commitment to DSL also points to another significant fact: This is a packet-based technology that carries no per-minute charges and leverages none of the telco's huge quantities of circuit-switched assets. Though the development would be easy to read as another step toward a universal packet-based infrastructure, industry observers caution that a hybrid is the more likely result.

That brings us back to the U S West split.

The lack of synergy between telephony and cable TV-two uniquely different parts of the communications industry-emerged gradually, leaving behind such vaunted ventures as Tele-TV, Time Warner's full service network and Pacific Bell's interactive services group. The economics and the personalities-telcos' operations perfectionism vs. cable TV's maverick entrepreneurship-failed to fit in the end.

Now we'll wait for new interpretations of the industry's future to emerge from a reconfigured Federal Communications Commission, confirmed last week by the U.S. Senate.