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Crawling Down the Road to Fast DSL Access

Many service providers are interested in Digital Subscriber Line technology, but few are online.

By Kim Girard, PCWorld   

Most local carriers are testing the technology, which can provide megabit speeds over regular copper telephone lines. But to users%squot chagrin, rollout has been limited to small pockets across the nation.

DSL is valuable to telecommuters and remote users, because it provides Internet and remote LAN access over copper phone lines that far outstrips Integrated Services Digital Network%squots (ISDN) 128-kilobits-per-second speed. Workers say they can access the corporate LAN much faster with DSL, which makes them more productive and less frustrated by slow connections.

But according to a recent report from Dataquest, a San Jose, California-based consulting firm, DSL services will take twice as long as expected to launch because of clashing standards, line problems, and uncertainty over how to price and market the technology. Dataquest has backed off its prediction that several million DSL lines will be installed by 2000; it now predicts a million lines at best will be installed by that time.

%dquotThere is right now more hype than reality in the DSL marketplace,%dquot said Brett Azuma, a director and principal analyst at Dataquest. %dquotThe [carriers] were all hot to trot in the third quarter last year. Their lack of announcements makes me wonder.%dquot

But some analysts compared DSL deployment to that of ISDN, which is expected to finally reach 1 million installed lines this year--a decade after it was introduced. ISDN adoption suffered from installation problems, wild pricing differentiation by region, and unavailability in some areas.

%dquotDSL has value and a market, but unless [carriers] do a better job deploying it than they have with ISDN, it will be pre-empted by cable,%dquot said Joel Maloff, president of The Maloff Co., a research firm in Dexter, Michigan.

But Bob Egan, a research director at the Gartner Group in Stamford, Connecticut said he doubts DSL availability will drag as slowly as ISDN because DSL lets carriers offload data traffic from switches that are overloaded by users who dial in to access the Internet. But don%squott expect mass deployment of DSL soon, Egan said.

%dquotI think the [regional Bell operating companies] are lumbering giants. Until we see increased competition from wireless and cable on the local loop, they%squotll continue to be lumbering giants,%dquot Egan said.

In the meantime, users are trying to make sense of the DSL alphabet soup. Several providers have introduced IDSL, a hybrid of ISDN and DSL that promises speeds up to 768 kilobits per second.

They include UUNet Technologies and U.S. West Communications, which offers the service in 14 cities.