The Architecture of Internet 2.0

[ Kevin Werbach ]

Originally published in Release 1.0, February 19, 1999 ( 21 pages in print ).www.edventure.com

We're approaching a critical point in the evolution of the Internet. So far we've been lucky. Back in the early 1990s, the major players in the computing and communications industries were busy chasing video on demand, closed proprietary online services and the information superhighway. They didn't much care about a bunch of academics, researchers and engineers setting up a commercial inter-network based on the Internet protocol. Many of those companies now get it... which may be cause for concern.

Architecture matters. For the most part, today's Net is open, decentralized and competitive. It fosters innovation because it is a standards-based general-purpose platform. Anyone can use it, and anyone can communicate with anyone else. Any browser (ideally) can download and display anyone's content -- and with Java or plug-ins, run their code. Companies like Mirabilis, eBay and Real Networks can develop and distribute innovative applications that spur usage, without owning any network infrastructure. Service providers must continually offer better pricing, services and support to win users' business.

The people building the next generation of high-speed access pipelines are trying to change this model. They want to tie those pipelines to the content and services they are selling, and control interconnection to the world at large. Their intractability may damage the network's openness and slow down its development. Today's Internet has grown rapidly because it is open; the next-generation Internet will not grow quickly unless it too is open and competitive. The tragedy of the cyber-commons is that competitive access benefits all providers collectively but few individually. The answer is not intrusive regulation but a set of business agreements, although government prodding may be the only way to get the parties to the table.

Anyone interested in the future of the Net should understand this debate.

Today's Net is release 1.0. Like all first commercial releases, it has bugs and missing features... but works well enough for most people. Yet in the grand scheme of things, version 1.0 is less important than what comes before and after. You can get away with more bugs and experimentation in the beta, but at some point you have to ship. On the other end, it takes several revs to fill out the reliability and feature set. Windows 1.0 wasn't terribly important except as a way station to version 3.1 and beyond....

The transition from Internet 0.9 to Internet 1.0 took place in the early 1990s, when the US National Science Foundation privatized the NSFNet backbone. Until that time the core of the Internet was a research and education network, and there were only a handful of commercial ISPs. Commercial ISPs and backbones were a necessary precursor for other developments on the Net, such as advertising-sponsored content sites, Web-driven enterprise re-engineering and electronic commerce. These innovations have driven the explosion in interest and investment in Net-related activities. However, the architecture of the network has remained largely the same in the 1990s. (For an overview, see appendix in Release 1.0, 6-98.)

The architecture of the Net will change with the move from narrowband to broadband. Right now we're witnessing version 1.5 improvements on the narrowband Net, using technologies such as load balancing, quality-of-service management and caching (see Release 1.0, 6-98). Internet 2.0 will be an always-on multi-megabit network, capable of supporting voice and video streams in addition to data all the way to the end-user.1

The next-generation Net does not simply offer more bandwidth; it delivers that bandwidth to the home. Bandwidth is being added constantly at the core of the network, and projects such as Internet2 are building high-speed IP networks for research and academic uses. For most users, however, the Internet experience remains the same today as five years ago. There may be more places to go and things to do, but you get there the same way. With higher bandwidth will also come always-on connectivity, enabling a whole new range of services. These developments will tie into emerging home networks (see Release 1.0, 12-98).

We take it for granted that IP networks are open, but that's not preordained. Today's Net was built on the telephone network. The endpoints of that network are open in many countries thanks to government liberalization requirements. In the US, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) stipulates that users rather than phone companies control customer premises equipment. As a result, residential users can plug modems into their phone jacks and can use any ISP they choose. This all works because the analog phone network, without modification, supports data communications up to about 50 kilobits per second (kbps).

Anything faster requires new network infrastructure. Several kinds of companies are beginning to make the necessary investments. In particular, cable and wireline local telephone companies are rolling out commercial high-speed services. In what follows, we talk specifically about the US situation, but many of the issues are relevant in other countries under slightly different legal regimes.2 (Disclosure: Kevin Werbach previously served as Counsel for New Technology Policy at the FCC; this article represents his personal views only.)

Broadband is coming! Broadband is coming!

"...@Home is promising to deliver Internet broadband to a million homes by the first quarter of 1997." -- Wired, January 1996

Actual US cable modem subscribers as of January 1999:

@Home 330,000

RoadRunner 180,000

We know what you're thinking: Broadband has been just around the corner for years. Cable and telephone companies have repeatedly made grandiose promises that haven't panned out. Deployment of residential high-speed access will indeed take several years, but we can't wait to address the issue of access.

This is a critical time because the constraints that have limited the growth of high-speed services are finally disappearing. Some of the issues are technical: getting systems to the necessary price points and reliability levels for mass deployment. Although hardware was available in 1995, solutions today are much more affordable and standards-based.

The most significant drivers are competitive. The companies best able financially to make the necessary investments are incumbent cable and local telephone companies, because running new wires into homes costs so much. Even these providers must make significant investments to support high-speed Internet access, and they have no incentive to take on the cost and risk until they perceive a competitive threat. The Telecommunication Act of 1996, rather than opening up the market to competition, largely fixed in place the standoff between telcos and cable operators in most of the country. Both have avoided major forays into the other's territory, allowing them to preserve their lucrative existing markets.

The stalemate is finally ending. Three years of legal wrangling over the meaning of the 1996 Telecom Act is finally subsiding, with the Supreme Court affirming the FCC's authority to set national policies for competitive access to local phone networks. AT&T's acquisition of TCI (and its recent partnership with Time-Warner) give it the ability to offer local telephone service over the cable plant. While the highly leveraged cable companies balked at the cost of cable telephony, AT&T has the resources to make it happen. Fortunately, the same network upgrades and end-user devices (set-top boxes or standalone cable modems) will enable both high-speed Internet access and voice telephony over cable.

The emerging high-speed duopoly

Local phone companies such as Bell Atlantic, US West and SBC now sell residential digital subscriber line (DSL) service in some areas. These services offer anywhere from 384 kbps to 6 megabits per second (mbps) downstream capacity, but much lower upstream speeds. Several competitive local-exchange carriers (CLECs) such as Covad, NorthPoint, and Rhythms NetConnections are marketing DSL over resold local phone lines, but almost exclusively to businesses at prices between $80 and $200 per month.

For the most part, cable operators are deploying high-speed services through two affiliated service providers: @Home and ServiceCo. @Home is jointly owned by several cable operators; TCI (recently acquired by AT&T) has a controlling stake. ServiceCo (a temporary name) is a partnership of Time-Warner's RoadRunner service and MediaOne (formerly part of US West). These providers have exclusive contracts with local cable operators, meaning that customers in those areas who want high-speed cable Internet access cannot use independent ISPs such as EarthLink or Prodigy.

Cable Internet architecture

Cable Internet access platforms, especially @Home, differ in important ways from dial-up Internet service providers (ISPs). In effect, @Home is a closed network that runs on the IP protocol and interfaces with the public Internet (see Figure 1). Groups of houses are connected to shared networks; we could call them neighborhood-area networks. At a cable head-end, those networks terminate in a cable modem termination system (CMTS). The CMTS connects to the regional and national @Home backbones, which tie into the rest of the Internet at network exchange points.

Subscribers pay a monthly fee (typically $35 to $50), and as part of that fee they also get access to content from @Home and its partners. Those partners now include Excite, which announced a merger with @Home last month, but so far it's not clear whether Excite will receive preferential treatment over its competitors. Customers can connect to any Website and can view content from other providers such as AOL, but they must pay AOL's subscription fee on top of the full @Home fee. In addition, because @Home caches content locally, its own content will have better apparent bandwidth than that of third-party content providers. Because @Home makes money through advertising and commerce partnerships, the company has little incentive to provide higher-speed connectivity to outside content.

@Home controls the cable modem in the user's home and functions as the service provider.3 Users cannot pay a reduced fee for the high-speed pipe alone; they must purchase the @Home ISP and content offerings. Even if a user pays for another ISP's services on top of the @Home subscription fee, the primary customer relationship is still with @Home. Independent ISPs such as MindSpring and EarthLink have no control over the user's connection setup and thus cannot compete on customer service or reliability.4 ServiceCo also refuses to allow customers to use independent ISPs. @Home has been the focus of the most attention because of the AT&T/TCI merger, its extensive use of local caching and its larger user base.

@Home, cable operators and AT&T claim that they need the vertically integrated access model to recoup their infrastructure investment. They say the subscription fees don't cover the full cost of the system, and they must receive advertising and transaction revenue to make the service profitable. They fiercely oppose any government order to unbundle the high-speed cable pipe from the @Home ISP and content service, arguing that government intervention would distort the free market and would chill innovation and investment.

Beyond POAS (plain old access services)

AT&T and the cable industry are fighting so hard partly because they see an opportunity to build an integrated application suite on top of the coaxial cable pipe. High-speed Internet access is merely the first and potentially the least significant offering. The local voice telephony market in the US generates roughly ten times the annual revenues of the ISP industry, and the video programming market also represents tens of billions of dollars per year. Cable operators believe they will have an easier time attacking these markets if they can build tightly coupled, application-centered networks tied to digital set-top boxes in customer homes. They are also concerned that a truly open high-speed Internet system will threaten their core video-programming revenues; @Home is required under its contracts with cable operators to limit streaming video clips over its system to 10 minutes in length.

The trouble with this vision is that it's not the Internet... and as a result it may not be as successful as the Internet. The vertically integrated model provides cable operators with better incentives to deploy facilities, but it leaves little room or incentive for third parties to develop innovative applications and services on that platform. The dynamism of the Net -- the Web browser, Amazon.com, Yahoo! and so on -- came about because the infrastructure was an open platform not tuned for any one kind of application. An always-on, high-speed Internet could enable many more unplanned innovations, but that will be less likely in the integrated world the cable operators are planning.

It's important to be clear here. Cable operators aren't filtering URLs to prevent customers from reaching unaffiliated content sites. The problem is that they could... and users would have no alternative. The cable operators wouldn't even have to be so blunt, because their caching architecture allows some sites to receive better treatment than others. Also, customers may not be able to use new services, such as home servers, without @Home's blessing. Any ISP faces pressures to keep customers in its own orbit, but users can normally vote with their feet.

Where things stand in Washington

Local phone companies in the US are legally required to allow competitors to share their networks, but the same rules don't apply to cable operators. The cable equal-access issue could still come before the FCC in several contexts. The FCC must approve AT&T's acquisition of TCI and the controlling interest in @Home that comes with it. Several parties, including AOL, MindSpring and the Media Access Project, filed formal comments on this issue in the merger proceeding. They urged the FCC to condition the merger on a guarantee to independent ISPs of equal access to the @Home broadband pipe.

The FCC had not issued a decision at press time, but it has hinted strongly that it won't impose any such conditions. AT&T ceo Michael Armstrong has stated that restrictions on @Home would imperil the entire TCI acquisition. The FCC desperately wants competition in local residential telephony, and AT&T has promised to spend billions to offer telephone service over TCI's cable plant. That AT&T would back out of a $48-billion deal because of restrictions on its part-ownership of a 330,000-subscriber Internet service suggests that something important is going on here.

The cable issue also came up in the FCC's section 706 advanced networks proceeding. On February 2 the FCC released a report to Congress on the deployment of advanced communications services, as required under section 706 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The original staff draft of the report included a notice of inquiry seeking comment on open access to cable Internet services. This would have provided an opportunity for comment outside the AT&T/TCI merger proceeding, although the FCC probably wouldn't have proposed any specific rule changes. However, the notice of inquiry was removed at the last minute. FCC Commissioners were concerned that any move toward imposing conditions on cable Internet services would scare away investors, and would constitute unnecessary government intrusion in the development of the Net. They did not want to forestall the likely investments by AT&T in high-speed Internet and voice services over TCI's network.

The FCC is right to be concerned about over-regulation of the Internet, but when it comes to monopoly last-mile infrastructure the issue is not whether government will regulate but how. The FCC and local authorities control what providers charge for services over both telephone and cable networks. They don't regulate ISP pricing because the market does a better job. Regulated companies always offer a Faustian bargain: Allow us to exclude competitors as an "incentive," and we'll provide services customers want. It's a vicious circle that only leads to more regulation when the promised services fail to materialize. The point here is not that AT&T, @Home and the cable operators are evil; the local phone companies -- and AOL -- have also built closed systems when they thought they could get away with it. The only way to ensure investment, innovation and deregulation is to have competition in every segment of the market.

The FCC did leave open the door for future action. Supporters of unbundling are taking their case to Congress and to the local franchising authorities in every city that must approve the AT&T/TCI merger. They also formed the Open Net Coalition to coordinate their activities.

Cable unbundling 101

So far the debate has been conducted on policy rather than technical grounds. Just how difficult would it be to allow cable customers to use independent ISPs?

Because the cable modem termination system is the primary interface node for the local cable Internet infrastructure, and uses standard interfaces such as Ethernet, it is the most likely point to interconnect independent ISPs (see Figure 1). AOL vp of broadband development Mario Vecchi argues that ISPs could connect at several points, including private peering relationships between backbones one router hop beyond the CMTS. Vecchi claims that engineers could resolve any management and technical issues, just as they do today when interconnecting ISP backbone networks. As Vecchi points out, hardware vendors such as Cisco and Lucent would compete to offer multiple-access equipment if they saw the demand, but now they are building equipment tuned for a single provider. Other companies may have software that simplifies the interconnection process, but in the current environment there is no market for such a solution.

@Home cto Milo Medin, in his FCC comments, acknowledged that independent ISPs could connect at the CMTS. He argued that this approach was not feasible, however, for several reasons. First, one ISP could accidentally impair the service of other ISPs connected to the same CMTS, because all share the same Ethernet bandwidth. Second, the CMTS would have to be configured to associate the correct ISP address space with each ISP, and that addressing information would have to be incorporated into dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP) servers, but it would be impractical for each ISP to have its own DHCP server. Third, one ill-behaved modem or user can affect all others in that neighborhood.

True enough: A system with multiple providers is more complicated than a vertically integrated approach. But all the problems listed by Medin have solutions; the question is just who will pay the costs. To avoid congestion at the CMTS or the neighborhood-area network, cable operators and independent ISPs would have to coordinate their procedures. The cable operator's DHCP servers and order provisioning systems would need to interact with ISP customer databases. This would require new procedures and automated systems, which would take time and money to develop.

There is some evidence that cable Internet access platforms can be shared with independent ISPs. MindSpring has successfully tested interconnection with Knology, which is building cable networks for high-speed Internet access in several southeastern US cities. In July 1998, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) ordered cable operators and ISPs to develop a mechanism for Canadian cable customers to select among competing ISPs. The Canadian Cable Television Association has filed a series of implementation reports since then, and has a timetable for technical trials during 1999 (see Resources section). Many business issues remain to be resolved, but the progress so far in Canada suggests that these are not impossible problems.

Is it worth the effort? If ISPs just provided transport, cable operators might have a point. @Home offers connectivity all the way from the customer premises to the public Internet with an architecture optimized for speed. But as companies such as MindSpring have shown, ISPs that own no transport facilities can compete on the basis of superior service and support. We don't doubt that @Home intends to offer an excellent customer experience. As the AT&T breakup demonstrated, however, competition produces lower prices and better service.

What's up, DOCSIS?

The cable industry, through its CableLabs standards organization, has developed the data over cable service interface specification (DOCSIS) for interoperable cable modems. DOCSIS 1.0 is now available and DOCSIS 1.1 is moving through the standards process, with volume shipments of DOCSIS, compatible modems expected this year. DOCSIS has been designed to allow interoperability of cable modems from multiple manufacturers. However, it wasn't designed with multiple ISPs in mind.

To facilitate unbundled cable Internet services, DOCSIS could be extended to support source routing and greater remote configuration features. The broader problem is that the standards process has so far been focused on the needs of the cable industry rather than the larger community of potential high-speed Internet providers. AOL's Vecchi and other proponents of open access say cable networks can be opened to independent ISPs without any changes to DOCSIS, but acknowledge that standards changes could help. Down the road technical standards are bound to play an important role, as they have for the Internet in general.

Competitive alternatives

Open access to high-speed cable Internet systems matters only if there are not likely to be alternative open pipes into the home. If most residential customers had a choice between a vertically integrated high-speed cable Internet service and a comparable phoneline high-speed Internet service that was open to independent ISPs, there wouldn't be much of a fight about the architecture of the cable service. In fact, its very closedness would become a competitive disadvantage, like a cable service that offered a limited range of channels. Everyone agrees that the goal is competitive, unregulated markets.

@Home and its supporters argue that DSL provides a competitive alternative to cable Internet services. So far, however, DSL services have been targeted primarily at small businesses, and less than 100,000 customers have DSL service compared to more than 500,000 with cable modems. DSL is also sensitive to conditions of individual phone lines, and doesn't work as well over the longer-distance loops in suburban and rural areas. It is easier to provide access to independent ISPs on DSL systems because these networks feed into central switching points at phone-company end offices, which are already designed to hand off traffic to long-distance carriers, competitive local-exchange carriers and ISPs. Local telephone companies are also subject to more stringent equal-access regulatory requirements.


Dramatis personae The cable unbundling issue affects virtually every player in the industry. AT&T alone reportedly has 53 lobbyists working on it. The battle lines are being drawn, and some interesting alliances are forming:

Supporting unbundled access to cable Internet pipes:

Independent ISPs (AOL, MindSpring, Prodigy, EarthLink, Verio)

Consumer groups (Media Access Project, Consumer Federation of America, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility)

Long-distance carriers (MCI Worldcom, Qwest)

Local phone companies (US West)

Independent content providers (Disney, Bertelsmann)

Supporting integrated cable Internet services:

AT&T

Cable operators and @Home

Excite (owned by @Home)

Vendors to cable Internet services (Intel, Microsoft, Cisco)

Kleiner Perkins (investor in @Home and Excite)


Nonetheless, most residential DSL deployments offer no ISP choices other than the phone company's affiliated provider. US West, while lobbying for unbundled cable Internet services, has been accused of discriminating against ISPs seeking access to its DSL networks. AOL recently struck a deal with Bell Atlantic to allow customers to purchase DSL service with AOL as the ISP and content provider for about $40 per month. Such deals may proliferate, but the slow pace of local telephone competition shows how reluctant incumbent carriers can be to allow competitors in.

Several companies are working on wireless local-loop solutions that offer speeds significantly greater than current dial-up connections. Existing wireless services such as Metricom's Ricochet offer mobility but limited speed. The alternative is fixed wireless, where users connect in a single location but can enjoy faster service. Unlicensed and licensed wireless systems continue to improve in price/performance over time. (See, for example, the 2.4-ghz unlicensed wireless home-networking solutions we described in Release 1.0, 12-98.) Digital television spectrum may provide huge untapped new two-way bandwidth, although the current allocation rules aren't designed to exploit it.

If cable modem and DSL services are successful, there will be pressure for alternatives to serve independent ISPs. We wouldn't rule out a breakthrough, but it's unlikely any technology will threaten cable and DSL in the next five years.

Where do we go from here?

As we stated at the outset, the issue is broader than @Home, cable operators or the FCC. The question is whether an open high-speed Internet, modeled on the wildly successful Internet of today, makes economic and technical sense. We believe it does, and that efforts to supersede it with closed systems won't generate the same level of investment and innovation. In other words, a closed Internet won't grow the way the open one has. Even Microsoft was unsuccessful in building a proprietary online service with MSN.

As networking moves deeper into everyday life (see Release 1.0, 12-98), last-mile infrastructure will grow in importance. Under any likely scenario, you'll still be able to send e-mail anywhere and reach any URL, but those functions will represent a shrinking fraction of the Net's functionality. If service providers continue to insist that Internet 2.0 operate on a closed model, the most significant consequence will be to delay deployment of such a network. @Home's exclusive contracts with cable operators expire in less than five years; at the current rate the vast majority of households may still be using dial-up modems at that point in time.

The market, not the government, should be able to take care of this issue. If an ISP is willing to pay a cable operator enough, the two parties should be able to reach a mutually beneficial business agreement. Instead of arguing on principles, the parties need to explore the financial trade-offs in concrete dollar values. What are the supplemental revenues cable operators could receive by tying subscribers to an affiliated ISP? What are the costs of implementing open access systems? What would the ISPs pay for using such high-speed access to reach their customers? Both sides have taken extreme positions and used the regulatory process as a bargaining chip rather than exploring room for compromise.

If the FCC tries to supervise precise details and pricing of interconnection, cable companies and their investors will justifiably think twice about building out aggressively. On the contrary, the businesspeople should hammer out agreements and tell their engineers to find technical solutions. Several ISPs should be able to sign up more customers than the cable operator alone, and both sides will benefit. After all, @Home currently has only 331,000 subscribers despite being available to 13.2 million homes, a 2.5 percent take rate at a time when some 40 percent of US homes have Internet access. Many people have Internet access today because AOL mailed them a disk or their local ISP walked them through the set-up process; the same dynamic will occur in the high-speed market if competition exists.

However, there is a small role for the FCC: It could help matters along by issuing a non-binding policy statement in favor of open high-speed Internet systems, with a specific timetable for reviewing the pace of deployment. At the same time, it could describe specific deregulatory steps it will consider under a competitive scenario. The FCC could also request data on costs and technical concerns that would help companies to start thinking about business cases instead of "moral" positions; the absence of such information makes it difficult to evaluate competing claims. Either formally or informally, the two sides could be encouraged to sit down together and explore potential arrangements. At the least such discussions would illuminate the distance between the two camps.

We suspect none of this will happen, and most cable and telephone companies will continue to exclude independent ISPs from their systems. We also suspect that two to three years from now high-speed access penetration will still be lower than analysts are predicting. At that point the FCC probably will start some sort of proceeding, but it will be more difficult to open up networks that have already been deployed.

We hope we're wrong. Either way, the fork in the road is before us today. All participants in the industry should consider which option they prefer.


Release 1.0 is published monthly except for a combined July/August issue by EDventure Holdings Inc., 104 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10011-6901; (212) 924-8800; fax (212) 924-0240;

http://www.edventure.com

It covers software, the Internet, electronic commerce, convergence, online services, groupware, text management, connectivity, messaging, wireless communications, intellectual property law and other unpredictable topics. Editor: Esther Dyson (edyson@edventure.com); publisher: Daphne Kis (daphne@edventure.com); managing editor: Kevin Werbach (kevin@edventure.com);office manager: Helen Martin (helen@edventure.com); circulation manager: Scott Giering (scott@edventure.com); assistant: Trista Schroeder (trista@edventure.com). Copyright 1999, EDventure Holdings Inc. All rights reserved. No material in this publication may be reproduced without written permission; however, we gladly arrange for reprints or bulk purchases. Subscriptions cost $695 per year, $750 overseas.

RESOURCES & PHONE NUMBERS

Steven Teplitz, AOL, (202) 530-7883; fax, (202) 530-7879; steventep@aol.com

Mario Vecchi, AOL, (703) 265-3215; mariorrg@aol.com

Marilyn Cade, AT&T, (202) 457-2106; fax, (202) 457-3052; mcade@attmail.com

Milo Medin, @Home, (415) 944-7200; fax, (415) 421-3128; medin@home.net

Mike Lynch, Autonomy, (415) 243-9955; fax, (415) 243-9984; mrl@agentware.com

Paul Hurley, Aveo, (408) 486-7900; fax, (408) 486-7910; phurley@aveo.com

David Thomas, Broadquest, (408) 288-3960; fax, (408) 287-5666; dthomas@broadquest.com

David Reed, Cable Labs, (303) 661-3781; fax, (303) 661-9199; dreed@cablelabs.com

Eric Lee, Commercial Internet Exchange, (202) 887-5459; lee@cix.org

Jim Burger, Dow, Lohnes & Albertson, (202) 776-2300; fax, (202) 776-2222; jburger@dlalaw.com

Ed Anuff, Oliver Muoto, Epicentric, (415) 974-0280; fax, (415) 974-0281; ed@epicentric.com, oliver@epicentric.com.

Bob Frankston, (617) 510-6547; fax, (212) 253-4029; bobf@frankston.com

Bob Pepper, FCC, (202) 418-2030; fax, (202) 418-2807; rpepper@fcc.gov; www.fcc.gov

Donna Lampert, Donna Lampert Associates, (202) 393-6410; fax, (202) 393-6411; dnlampert@aol.com

Bill Whyman, Legg Mason Precursor Group (202) 778-1972; wewhyman@leggmason.com

Cheryl Leanza, Media Access Project, (202) 232-4300; fax, (202) 466-7656; cleanza@essential.org

Jonah Seiger, Shabbir Safdar, Mindshare Internet Campaigns, (202) 887-7071; fax, (202) 887-7074; jseiger@mindshare.net, shabbir@mindshare.net

Charles Brewer, Mindspring, (404) 815-0770; mchenry@mindspring.net

Joe Fantuzzi, netDialog, (650) 372-1205; fax, (650) 372-1201; jfantuzzi@netdialog.com

David Reed, (508) 785-2675; fax, (508) 785-8194; dpreed@reed.com

Kurt Brouwer, Michael Ciocia, Chris Spain, Shaman Corporation, (415) 241-9952; fax, (415) 241-8854; kbrouwer@shamancorp.com, mciocia@shamancorp.com, cspain@shamancorp.com; www.shamancorp.com

Ron Weissman, Verity, (408) 541-1500; fax, (408) 541-1600; rweissman@verity.com

For further reading:

Barbara Esbin, Internet Over Cable: Defining the Future in Terms of the Past, FCC Office of Plans and Policy Working Paper No. 30 (August 1998), www.fcc.gov/opp/workingp.html.

Followup to decision CRTC 98-9 ( cable Internet unbundling in Canada),
www.crtc.gc.ca/ENG/PROC_REP/TELECOM/1998/8638/C12-17.html.

David Isenberg, "10 Gigabits to Every Canadian Home by 2005," SMART Letter #16, www.isen.com.

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