Wave Issue 9608 9/13/96 Article 7-01

***@Home Finally Launches
by David Lohse

After many months of anticipation, TCI has finally launched their much-
hyped @Home Network. Having finished the last test phase last week, TCI
has announced the availability of @Home to customers in their first market
in Fremont, CA, with services soon to be available in West Hartford, CT.
Other markets are expected to soon follow: in addition to TCI's own
markets, @Home partnerships are being established with other cable
companies (currently partnerships have been established with Comcast and
Cox Communications).

The large initiative finally brings cable modem technology to the
mainstream, allowing users access speeds of 10 Mbps downstream and 128
kbps upstream. Although consumers will have access to @Home at a maximum
rate of 10 Mbps over the cable infrastructure, in practice they will not
reach this maximum in most cases, since they will have to share that
bandwidth with other local users. For example, seven users accessing
streaming video content simultaneously at 1.5 Mbps will quickly deplete
the available bandwidth. Possible solutions are for the cable company to
"split the fiber" so that a data channel serves fewer homes, or for
improved compression techniques to be developed.

The pricing for @Home services is also very reasonable, and as the
availability becomes more widespread it threatens to change the current
pricing structure for online services. For a one-time set-up fee of $150,
a user is supplied with a dataport, ethernet card and @Home software, and
for a monthly cost of $34.95 the user has high-speed access not only to
the Internet, but to @Home's proprietary services and content.

http://www.home.net