Computer downloads free karaoke online

The broadband flood is leaving the residential user high and dry. Here's a look at three providers that are trying to get the bandwidth flowing to the home

Broadband. It's everywhere you want to be.

Tell that to Victoria's Secret. When the company planned its second annual Internet lingerie show earlier this year, it wanted above all to avoid the system crashes and irate e-mails that marred the first one in 1999, held on a weekend night.

So this time around, Victoria's Secret scheduled it for 2 p.m.on a Thursday - when would-be fashion aficionados were at work and more likely to log on via a fat broadband pipe. And about 2 million of them did. Productivity went down, but the system stayed up.

For all the talk of the coming broadband tsunami, and despite its success in the workplace, the bandwidth revolution has left the American household relatively high and dry.

Residential broadband has just not made many inroads into the home lives of end users. About 2.5 million Internet access customers, or 4.5% of the more than 50 million total ISP customers in the U.S., had cable or DSL connections in the first quarter of this year. A survey by Jupiter Communications estimates that an additional 20% would be willing to opt for high-speed access within the next two years or when it becomes available in their area.

True, growth rates for cable modem and DSL access have been reaching for the stratosphere in recent months. DSL installations grew by 186% during the first quarter, according to Insight Research. The Yankee Group forecasts that DSL users will grow from 300,000 in 1999 to 7 million by 2004 - an increase of more than 2000%. In that same period, the ranks of cable modem subscribers are expected to grow from 1.1 million in 1999 to 9.6 million in 2004, according to The Yankee Group.

That's impressive, but it still won't amount to even half of the users who will get their Internet via dial-up. And that poses a dilemma for ISPs that wan t to get out of the business of selling plain-vanilla access: How do you migrate consumers to higher bandwidths? The commercial case for high-speed access is fairly self-evident: It's fast, and it's fat. But what will induce residential users to jump to the next level of Internet access?

"Broadband ISPs have to do a better job of both expanding their market and enhancing their offerings," says Matt Davis, an analyst with The Yankee Group. "They have to reach beyond the early-adopter segment of the market, and they have to do it quickly," he says. "Beyond that cutting-edge crowd, the market shows a lot less tendency to change providers, so if their competitors - or competing technologies like satellite Internet - snatch those users away, they're likely to be locked up for a while."

Setting aside DSL's problems with installation and cable's issues as a shared network in which speeds degrade as users come online, there appears to be three main keys to tempting dial-up subscribers to switch to the fast lane: enhanced value, the tight integration of content and an attractive price.

ZoomTown: Broadband with a purpose

Mike O'Brien has taken the measure of the early adopters in his role as president of ZoomTown, the high-speed Internet service run by Cincinnati Bell and its parent company Broadwing. "We value their contributions and their ideas and suggestions, but they're the most disloyal people in the world," he says. "You can't make a business serving those folks."

ZoomTown currently has 25,000 DSL customers and 35,000 additional customers for its Fuse dial-up Internet service. Started in 1998, the service has just begun to roll out the first pair of what it expects will be a host of value-enhancing partnerships: CoolCast, a multicasting service offering concerts and entertainment over the Web, and MediaStation, which allows users to rent CD-ROM software such as games and educational titles. Intertainer, which provides video-on-demand (VOD) to broadband service providers, is in a paid 500-user market trial over ZoomTown's network.

"All three of these services give people a reason to go for broadband," says Rob Pickering, director of technical services for ZoomTown. "Selling broadband simply on the fact that you can do what you're doing today, but faster and without a boot-up, is appealing to a certain small population."

But Pickering points to a larger potential market that is more interested in utility than speed. Reaching them means talking about what broadband can do. Full-screen movies on the PC and online software downloads are the value tale to tell this segment, he says.

Of course, layering services on top of the network complicated running the network. To keep up, ZoomTown built a network operations center and to split the sys/admin team into engineering and operations divisions.

"When I first came on last year as a network architect, we had a quasi-operations group that was actually doing engineering," says Jeff Carr, director of operations for ZoomTown. "The guys would build something and then just add it to the list of things they'd have to maintain for the rest of their lives. So we quickly found ourselves not scaling well because we had to keep adding engineers."

But the ZoomTown crew has been able to make that necessity work in its favor by opening a prospering sideline as a testbed for outside applications. Pickering's team builds, tests and monitors the applications in a cramped testing lab; then, those third-party developers have the option to see how their product will fare in a controlled real-world environment.

"We can say, `Look, we got it working in the lab - now wait till you see what it takes to get it working among 25,000 DSL customers," Carr says.

The model allowed ZoomTown to launch its three major services in the last year and will enable an exponential increase in service rollouts in the coming year, Pickering predicts. "We've built a self-sustaining environment," he says. "Now when we bring a partner's product in, we know how it's going to flow through engineering to operations and launch out the back end."

The Intertainer VOD service was a beneficiary of ZoomTown's engineering efforts. When it first came on as a partner, the company told ZoomTown it would have to upgrade its customers to speeds of 1.3 Mb/s for acceptable video results.

"We started working through lots of issues with jitter and latency, streamlining their stuff, tweaking our network to make it more efficient," Pickering says. "Now we're running their stream at 850 kb/s, which is practically at our 768 kb/s low-speed offering. That's much more palatable."

"We like to take a company from 80% to 100%," O'Brien says. "We're very good at finding that last 20%. It's our way of adding the third of what I call the `three Ps' to a product - pipe, ping and power." Without that step, he says, the product may get deployed but with inferior quality, and customers won't see the value. Who wants to watch jittery movies on a desktop PC when they can see them jitter-free on that big box in the living room?

ZoomTown doesn't give the "three Ps" treatment to every application, of course. Sometimes it's enough just to give customers a link to an existing site - for example, MapQuest. But the ISP has identified three areas in which it can add substantive value: when the application is broadband-dependent (such as video games), when it requires a cross-network solution (unified messaging) and when large, centrally processed applications need the jump-start of a network effect.

"If we can do 10 or 20 really great applications from those categories, and complement them with the best of the public Web, we can deliver to consumers the great experiences that make it easy for them to understand the value of our offering," says Charles Carnegie, director of service development for ZoomTown.

And thanks to focus groups and its in-house help desk services, ZoomTown has an ongoing conversation with DSL users to find out what they want from the service. After the MediaStation rollout, Carnegie began getting requests from end users for - of all things - karaoke applications. He's now funneling those requests to MediaStation and getting software on the menu that will satisfy the needs of Cincinnati's budding Sinatras.

Excite@Home: Content made simple

Applications are good. But they're better - more useful to customers and certainly more useful as a competitive tool - when seamlessly integrated into a customizable, intuitive package.