By Mo Krochmal,
Within six years, the cable television industry will be a winner in the bandwidth battle, said speakers at a New York conference Wednesday.
Bandwidth has been one of the key concerns of industries that are profiting from the explosive growth of the Internet.
"After talking about it for several years, we are now in the deployment and rollout phase," said Larry Gerbrandt, a senior analyst with Paul Kagan Associates, a Silicon Valley research firm.
At the "High Speed Data to the TV & PC" conference, representatives from the cable industry met with computer manufacturers such as Sun and others like Bay Networks, content providers, and telephone and cable supply companies to look at the future of connectivity to the home.
According to Kagan Associates' projections, by the end of 1998, cable modems will be installed in a million homes in the U.S., while the telephone companies will have installed their high bandwidth connection technology, digital subscriber lines, into 100,000 homes.
By 2006, Kagan predicts there will be 39 million homes with cable data connections and another 25 million with asymmetrical digital subscriber line (ADSL) connections. Cable data connections, which cost about $40 a month, should get less expensive while phone companies will have to find a way to reduce $200 or more monthly charges for digital subscriber lines.
All that data, and where will it go?
"The computer will continue to do computing, but the information hearth, where everyone sits around one place, will change," said Avram Miller, vice president for business development for Intel. "The model is broken, people will not want interactivity in just one place. We will want to interact with information wherever we want in our house."
While cable will dominate in the United States, Miller said, that is not the case globally.
Worldwide, "Satellites will be important because most people in the world are not connected to any wires," he said.
Miller added, "ADSL is a great technology, but maybe it is in the hands of the wrong industry."
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