Ray Van Eng (11/19/96)               

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ADSL (Asymmetrical Digital Subscriber Line) is here at last.

In Canada, the first service provider that leaps off the gate is SaskTel, the local Bell operating company in Saskatchewan, a province of wheat fields and cold winters. Many expect other Canadian baby Bells throughout the country will follow suit shortly.

The service, dubbed Sympatico High Speed allows a customer to use an existing telephone line to surf the Internet at speeds up to 1.5Mbps. To sign up for one full year of service (mandatory), you would need to pay a C$99 installation fee plus C$69.95 a month for usage.

Regular voice calls will not be affected while you use the same line for Internet data access, since audio traffic consumes only about 1% of the total bandwidth. The service is initially available in selected areas within the two major cities: Regina and Saskatoon.

Although the ADSL technology has been extensively tested in North America by such phone giants as Bell Atlantic, GTE, Nynex, US West, Bell Canada and others, commercial roll-outs have been slow and limited in scope, for example, a Chicago based Internet service provider, InterAccess is offering high speed ADSL services available only in a three mile radius in downtown Chicago.

It is only when cable companies announced their move to provide cable modem services that the big telephone companies are beginning to go forward with the ADSL service in the face of competition.

Recently announced cable modem services include Rogers Communications and Shaw Cables in Canada, TCI, Comcast, and Cox with their @Home service, and Time Warner's RoadRunner.

Over in Europe, Telecom Finland Ltd. is making cable modem services available to thousands of homes in Lappeenranta, an area about 120 miles east of Helsinki, the country's capital. The Finns say that they will upgrade their current 4Mbps Zenith made cable modem to the one offered by Motorola which are said to be capable of 30 Mbps sometime next year.

So how bad do some netheads want high speed access to the Internet? According to John Doerr, one of the originators of the @Home service, "I get letters from people who want to know where we're going to deploy (the @Home service) next, so they can move there. No kidding."

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