Companies Predict Swift Uptake Of Cable Modems
The Age
Tuesday February 13, 1996
COMMUNICATIONS companies have predicted a swift and easy upgrade to cable-modem technology and broadband services by Australian consumers as vendors and carriers plough ahead with trials.
In perhaps its most significant announcement this year, Intel Australia will tomorrow reveal plans to use Australia as the test bed for cable modem trials across the Asia-Pacific region.
And next week, key personnel in Hewlett-Packard's United States cable-modem manufacturing arm arrives to evaluate the product's potential in Australia.
In the US, Comcast and Time Warner have purchased thousands of HP cable modems for trials and commercial deployments.
Intel would not specify a release date for its CablePort Adapter, that will give the user 27Mbits-per-second download capability and 96Kbit-per-second transmission of data upstream.
The cable modem will not be sold in Australia by Intel but may be put on the market here by a partner, said David Bass, a spokesman for the company. Cable modems will be as easy to install and use as today's modems, vendors say. Netcomm's range will be the first to the Australian market in June and will come in the same size and streamlined finish as its current offerings.
In its report, The Online Economy, research firm Cutler and Company estimates that cable modems will penetrate five million Australian households by mid-1999.
Netcomm has watched its share price soar from 50 cents when listed on the stock exchange 18 months ago, to a high of $1.
70 this January. The company was queried on the dramatic increase by the stock exchange before Christmas, said Ross Rathmell, Netcomm's chief financial officer.
Rathmell attributes the rise to a ``dawning" market awareness of Netcomm's business interests in the three prime areas that will deliver broadband services to the home: a profitable core modem business that is about to release cable modems; equity in one of Australia's largest Internet service providers, connect.com.au; and deals with two major telecommunications companies, AAP and ADC Telecommunications, that work in with the delivery of its products and services.
Cable modems will allow users to download and transmit digital data, video and telephony over the carriers' new hybrid fibre coaxial (HFC) networks 1000 times faster than analogue telephone modems.
``The answer to everything is bandwidth, and cable solves bandwidth," said Wayne Pickett, a communications consultant.
For most, the upgrade will be one-stop. Some may have to invest about $20 to replace old 8250 UART chips on their PCs' I/O card, but most 486 PCs come with the 16550 UART chip required, said Pickett.
Although Netcomm has no firm orders from the carriers for its modems, Optus Vision and Telstra Multimedia have indicated their intentions to adopt the technology.
Netcomm's new modems require the carriers to use the HomeWorx interface technology with their hybrid fibre coaxial networks (HFC) developed by Netcomm's cable-modem partner, ADC Telecommunications.
ADC has taken 15 per cent equity in Netcomm and made a $2 million dollar investment in the company to commercialise cable modems for the local and export markets.
Optus Vision announced a $185 million dollar deal with ADC Telecommunications about six months ago for HomeWorx-associated equipment, said Rathmell.
Meanwhile, Telstra is in the process of evaluating equipment from a range of vendors for its cable-modem trials this year and is ``sure ADC will be one of them", said Bob James, group general manager of strategic development for Telstra's Information Technology Group.
The drive to bring cable modems to market is escalating as the computer and communications industries hail the Internet as the main driver for consumers hitching a ride on the information superhighway rather than entertainment services delivered via interactive TV.
Last week Telstra chief executive, CEO Frank Blount, announced plans to accelerate the roll-out of Telstra Multimedia's HFC network, and his acceptance that Internet traffic is likely to usurp telephony on its networks by 2000.
The cable modem is the kind of device that will drive the market for the networked computer, recently espoused by industry visionaries at Oracle and Sun, said Telstra's James. The NC is described as a low-cost, diskless device (around $US500) that sits on a high-speed network and ``allows users to watch movies, cruise the Internet and, ultimately, make telephone calls".
© 1996 The Age
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