Wiring the Digital Manor Hasn't Gotten Any Easier
By Stewart Alsop Reporter Associate Jane Hodges

(FORTUNE Magazine) – In your service, Noble Reader, I am constantly in search of the latest technology. As I try to perfect my totally wired home, the Digital Manor, it is my responsibility as a columnist to report from the frontlines of the battle being fought over the Last Mile.

The Last Mile is code for the connection between a home and an access point to the Internet backbone (usually within a mile, hence the term). I'm always trying to get better performance on the Last Mile--so much so that my latest adventure even involves getting Net access via a satellite dish (sure, the satellite is a bit more than a mile away). This was a waste of time, except for one thing: I can now provide a snapshot of how far we are from having widespread connections to the info highway at freeway speed.

The vast majority of us connect to the Net by a modem and a phone line at relatively slow speeds of 28,000 to 36,000 bits per second. That's fine when you aren't sitting in front of your computer waiting for it to do something. Unfortunately, we are.

What we'd like is a way to connect the home to the Internet at speeds similar to what we enjoy at the office, where we can often get more than a million bits per second (known commonly as T1 speed). There are five technologies available for making such connections: telephone lines, television cables, satellite receivers, power lines, and possibly wireless. The problem is that our homes aren't equipped to make these kinds of connections, so the links all cost money--lots of it.

I have an ISDN line, a high-speed connection via phone lines. It works pretty well. At Digital Manor, an ISDN router sits in the basement. This router links to another ISDN router at Earthlink, our Internet access provider, whenever one of our three computers asks for the Net. So there's no messy modem connection. For us, browsing the Web or sending E-mail from home is as easy as browsing the Web at the office--just a bit slower.

That's one problem with ISDN--while it's two to three times faster than a regular modem, it's a tenth the speed of the T1 line most offices have. It's also expensive. Earthlink gives me my ISDN access for free, since I'm a member of their technical advisory committee. But if we weren't getting it free, we'd spend at least $50 a month for access on top of the $50 or so we pay Pacific Bell for the ISDN line. For most people, another $100 a month is something to pay attention to.

That raises a question: What's available that's better than ISDN? Right now, the best deal may be a cable connection to the Internet, which you can get for a flat charge of $40 a month--if you live in a neighborhood where it's available. The connection is fast, delivering as many as six million bits per second. People who have one report that it is a dream come true, often faster than their access at work. But many cable companies have problems making the system work and must spend big money to upgrade their cables and transmission systems to offer it. I can't get a superfast cable modem connection, even though TCI, my cable company, has been very aggressive about rolling out Internet access in the San Francisco area, where I live. (If anyone from TCI is reading this, please consider planning a rollout in the mid-Peninsula region south of San Francisco. Then I'll write a column about cable-based Internet access!)

I decided to try satellite access, which is supposed to give you access to the Internet at speeds of 400,000 bits per second (about three times as fast as my ISDN link). This service, called DirecPC, is offered by Hughes Electronics, which operates the satellites that provide the DirecTV and USSB satellite services for television.

With DirecPC, you plug a card into your PC, then plug the cable from the satellite dish into the the card. The Internet data are sent from the satellite to the dish and on to the PC through that cable. Since satellites only communicate in one direction (so far), you still need a modem for the computer to talk back to the Internet and tell the satellite which Web pages you want to look at. Sound complicated? It is. And Hughes makes it worse than it should be. For instance, when you install the PC card, Hughes recommends that you remove any network cards you might already have, install the Hughes card, and then re-install the other cards. This flies in the face of the idea of plug-and-play computing, where you should be able to install any new card and have the computer recognize and install the right software for it.

DirecPC is also pretty expensive. If we used it as we do our ISDN router, we'd pay a lot more--Hughes would get $110 a month with a surcharge of $1 per hour for more than 200 hours a month. Hughes offers cheaper service plans that can save you up to $80 a month, but only if you don't use it very much. Who would make all this effort to get high-speed access if they're only going to use the Net once in a while?

I never got the DirecPC connection to work. So I quit trying. Tripling my access speed just didn't justify the effort (nor the expense of paying a techie--my digital gardener--for the time he too spent trying to make that connection work).

The experience confirmed one key belief that I have: You can't make any technology a mass-market success if it requires two infrastructures to work. DirecPC requires you to master both a regular modem and the satellite connection. That's just too much for any normal human being to suffer through. Even I couldn't make it work, and I'm far from normal!

ISDN works, despite its slowness and expense, because you only need to get one device to operate successfully. The best cable connections also depend on just one device. (That said, there are some cable offerings that are like DirecPC and only provide the cable connection in one direction, requiring you to use a modem to talk back to the Internet.) Connections that would use the power lines attached to our houses, or that would tap into a cellular-like wireless unit, should also be two-way connections that only require one device. But these kinds of devices are still mostly dreams. The power-line devices won't be introduced for another three to five years, if ever. That's because power companies are very focused now on deregulation of their industry and haven't decided that Internet access is a real opportunity. The wireless devices will probably begin showing up in the next two years, but there are still significant issues about how to standardize such access and finance the building of the systems needed to support the devices.

So for now I've got just one more option to consider at Digital Manor (at least until TCI gets its act together). Sometime soon, I hope, I'll get to try out the successor to ISDN: DSL (digital subscriber line), which promises to give me Internet access at about the same speed as the satellite connection. That's a step up, but still not close to what the T1 line gives me at work. Pacific Bell is already offering this service in my neighborhood for a flat $100 a month. That's no more expensive than ISDN or satellite access. Others tell me that it works well and is pretty easy to install.

I'll believe it when I see it.

STEWART ALSOP is a partner with New Enterprise Associates, a venture capital firm. Except as noted, neither he nor his partnership has a financial interest in the companies mentioned. Alsop may be reached at stewart_alsop@fortunemail.com; the column may be bookmarked at www.fortune.com/technology/alsop/.

REPORTER ASSOCIATE Jane Hodges