Cityscape

Strike Up the Bandwidth

Among digital pundits, New York's backwater status is "a running joke," says Zia Daniell Wigder, an analyst for Jupiter Communications. She lives in Boston and may be the only Jupiter consultant who has broadband at home; the rest, in Manhattan, don't. "And we cover the high-bandwidth industry!" she says with a laugh.

The upshot of all this is the sort of hair-pulling frustration that could only be brought to you by the communications industry. Even those inside the companies seem uneasy with it. Joe Kraus adds, "Most people don't like their cable companies to begin with. So it tends to be kind of volatile." Or, as Bell's McIntosh puts it: "We're trying to disappoint as few people as possible."

Why is New York so far behind? The answer depends on whom you believe. The telecommunications and cable behemoths claim they are merely experimenting with smaller burgs to ensure that when they eventually wire Manhattan, they get it right. "We view this like a Broadway show. You take it on the road, you run the show. You add a few songs, you change a few dances. Then you bring it to the Big Apple," says Joe DiGeso, the general manager for Road Runner in New York. Bell Atlantic, which is currently wiring New York for its own DSL service -- called InfoSpeed DSL -- agrees. Jeff Waldhuter, director of Network Services Strategies for Bell Atlantic in the city, says, "New York is an important market. You want to get it right."

Telecom and cable companies also face serious logistic challenges. But there's an added irony -- that New Yorkers may be last specifically because they were first to get phone service. That was great in the late nineteenth century, but today it means our wiring is the oldest around, frequently buried underground. And adding in the new switches to make DSL possible is taking more time than expected. Our cable isn't so old, but it requires far more upgrading than phone lines -- mainly because it wasn't built to handle a two-way signal. Every switch and signal amplifier has to be replaced. "And cable is scattered all over the place," says Bob Hafner, vice-president of research for the Gartner Group. "It's beneath the sidewalk, it's up on poles. You're digging it up everywhere."

Still, it's hard to weep for these leviathans. Wiring New York may be hard, but critics say the companies are also, in their time-honored tradition, dragging their feet. Having a monopoly means never having to say you're sorry.

Small, local DSL-service providers, in particular, tend to go nonlinear at the mere mention of Bell Atlantic. When these smaller operations sign up a new customer, they rely on Bell to physically hook up the connection to the house. Bell owns the copper wire leading into your house; the DSL companies merely rent it. By law, Bell must comply with these companies. But since Bell is also rolling out its own DSL service, the relationship is a roiling stew of passive-aggressive behavior.

"Not since Nixon have we seen such incompetence and dirty tricks. It's a mess," gripes Joe Plotkin, director of marketing for Bway.net, the popular Manhattan Internet-service provider that started offering DSL connections in April. He's signed up "several hundred" DSL clients, and Bell Atlantic has messed up too many times for him to count. "All they do is delay, delay, delay," Plotkin says. Bell is even being sued by California-based Covad Communications Company, which is offering DSL in the New York market and claims its business has been harmed by Bell's moving too slowly.

Bell officials insist they are innocent, and many analysts agree. Rewiring New York's system for DSL is just naturally slow-going, they say; you can't blame Bell for technological realities. "I'm sure our competitors would like to snap their fingers and get stuff within a matter of hours," says Bell's Waldhuter. "We believe that we've been treating them fairly." Bell plans to have its own DSL service available for all of Manhattan by the end of 1999, with the boroughs to follow in the first half of 2000.

Whatever the outcome of the DSL wars, Joe Kraus's vision of broadband is still a long way off. So, if you want an interactive fridge right now, get one of those magnetic poetry kits. It's going to be a long wait.

E-mail: clive@echonyc.com