ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, May 12, 1996 TAG: 9605100093
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES
SOURCE: JEANNINE AVERSA ASSOCIATED PRESS
The cable that brings a pretty picture into your home can - and soon will in many places - hook your computer to the Internet and carry your local telephone calls, too.
Unleashed by a new telecommunications law, cable companies, like telephone companies, are taking steps to offer their customers a panoply of services - from local and long-distance to cable and computer connections.
Already going for a piece of the $100 billion-a-year local phone business, Time Warner Cable is providing residential local service to cable customers in Rochester, N.Y.
Cablevision Systems Corp. is doing the same for customers on Long Island, N.Y. Harron Communications is offering businesses phone services in Utica, N.Y.
And in Alexandria, Va., Jones Intercable is providing local phone service to 101 people living in apartments and condos. Installation is free. The company charges $37.32 a month for a package of cable and local phone service, said spokesman Jim Carlson.
Over the next five years ``the challenge will be to stay ahead of the competition ... not just with programming, promotion and service, but to get into the phone business and the computer hookup business,'' said Ted Turner, chairman of Turner Broadcasting System Inc. and incoming chairman of the National Cable Television Association board.
``The winners,'' Turner says, ``will be the ones that do the best job.''
Chief among the worries: Will people trust their cable company to provide local phone and other new services?
The cable industry - still haunted by years-old horror stories about poor customer service despite vast improvements - says it has learned valuable lessons and gained public trust.
``We're seeing the meter moving over toward cable's having great service,'' Turner said. But he lamented the old customer service stories: ``We're going to carry it to [our] grave!''
Telephone companies, not immune to service problems themselves, say they plan to exploit that perception as they compete against cable for both phone and cable customers.
Meanwhile, some cable companies also are connecting customers' home computers via cable modems and coaxial cable lines.
At its infancy now, this portion of the business should grow to $1.6 billion by 2000, the cable industry says.
Time Warner, working with Hewlett-Packard Co., Motorola Inc., American Online and Excalibur, is providing 200 customers in Elmira, N.Y., with connections to online services, including to the local government so people can check city council hearings or weigh in on school board issues.
After a $30 installation fee, customers are charged $24.95 a month for service, which includes Internet access, local e-mail, an electronic version of the local newspaper and the modem rental fee, said spokesman Mike Luftman.
Continental Cablevision provides 18,000 Boston College students cable TV service, Internet access, e-mail and telephone service, said spokesman David Woods. The college pays for the services, included in students' tuition.
Tele-Communications Inc. plans to test high-speed Internet hookups to 200 cable homes in Seattle, said Bill Bennett, general manager of TCI's north Seattle office.
Comcast in Union, N.J., is offering 200 Comcast customers work-at-home services on a trial basis, said spokesman Joe Waz.
``It has all the criteria of success,'' said Edward Horowitz, senior vice president of technology for Viacom Inc., which pioneered high-speed cable connections to home computers in Castro Valley, Calif. Viacom's cable systems have been sold to TCI.
Computer usage in homes connected to cable modems rises considerably - some as much as 35 percent, Horowitz says.
But making cable systems capable of providing such computer connections is not a ``trivial thing,'' Horowitz said.
Cable modems are 1,000 times faster than a 14.4 kilobits-a-second modem connected to standard copper wire phone lines.
Telephone companies are deploying technology called ISDN that offers a bigger bandwidth than a standard telephone line allowing data to move more quickly. By 2000, 6.7 million homes are expected to use ISDN to tap into the Internet.
ISDN at 128 kilobits a second is still not as fast as the fatter coaxial cable pipeline, which can move data at 10,000 kilobits a second.
Nonetheless cable rival Edward Grebow, president of Tele-TV Systems, a programming venture backed by three Bell telephone companies, predicted it would be ``many years'' before most cable companies can successfully deploy cable modems.
AP-DS-04-27-96 1134E
LENGTH: Medium: 91 linesby CNB