Cable Industry Issues Specification for High-Speed Data Delivery

Cablevision Sets Link to Internet For L.I. Viewers

Mark Landler
The New York Times

December 17, 1996

It will not unclog the Long Island Expressway. But thousands of cable television subscribers across Long Island will be getting a new service designed to ease traffic jams on the Internet.

The Cablevision Systems Corporation plans to announce today that it will offer cable modems to 15,000 of its subscribers in Oyster Bay, L.I., to connect their PC's to the Internet, company executives said yesterday. The company, which is the nation's sixth-largest cable operator, plans to hook up 150,000 subscribers on Long Island and in Connecticut by the end of 1997.

It is scheduled to be the first rollout of cable modems in the New York metropolitan area, and one of the most ambitious in the industry. The devices provide a link from a customer's personal computer to the Internet using coaxial cable rather than telephone lines. Because coaxial cable, which is also used to deliver cable television, has more capacity than copper telephone wire, it can transmit the digital bits of the Internet at much higher speeds.

For cable executives, the drive to provide cable modems has taken on particular urgency in recent months as the stocks of major cable companies have been pummeled because of jitters about new competitors and repeated delays in the industry's plans to introduce new services. The cable industry's torpor comes at a time when the telephone companies are scrambling to provide an integrated package of communications services to the home.

Executives at Cablevision said the company's new service, which is called Optimum Online, will enable subscribers to download text and images from the Internet's World Wide Web as much as 50 times faster than they can download with a phone line and a conventional modem.

''When you use this on your own PC, you'll see there's just no alternative,'' said Charles F. Dolan, the chairman of Cablevision, which has 2.8 million subscribers and is based in Woodbury, L.I.

The service, which will be offered to existing Cablevision subscribers as well as people who do not currently receive cable television, will cost $44.95 a month for a package that includes unlimited access to the Internet and a free modem. Subscribers can get the same package for $34.95 a month, plus a one-time payment of $150 for the modem.

Commercial on-line services like America Online typically charge $19.95 a month for unlimited access. But executives at Cablevision noted that a second phone line could cost $15 a month. Cable modems are attached to the same coaxial cable that provides the television service.

Cablevision, which has been developing Optimum Online for 18 months, has stolen a march on two of its major competitors, the Nynex Corporation and Time Warner Inc. A spokesman for Nynex, John Johnson, said that the regional Bell company planned to offer an Internet access service under the Nynex brand name in the first quarter of 1997. But he declined to offer any details.

Time Warner offers cable modem service to 400,000 cable customers in Akron, Ohio, and Elmira, N.Y. But executives at the company said yesterday that they would not be able to offer the service to their 1.2 million subscribers in New York City until late 1997 or early 1998 because the cable network had to be upgraded.

''This is a very demanding market, and we don't want to introduce the product until we're absolutely ready for it,'' Richard C. Aurelio, the president of Time Warner's New York City cable system, said.

Time Warner did, however, sign an agreement to provide Road Runner, its package of Internet-related programming, to Cablevision. Time Warner hopes to sell Road Runner, which features an array of Time Warner publications and services, to cable operators across the country.

In addition to Road Runner, Cablevision will offer its own menu of news, sports, entertainment and community features tailored for Long Island and Connecticut. The company will draw on its programming holdings, which range from the 24-hour news channel, News 12 Long Island, to the Madison Square Garden Network and the Bravo movie channel.

''We don't want to be just a high-speed pipe to the Internet, but we also don't want to have to invent every piece of content ourselves,'' said Joseph Cece, a former publisher of TV Guide magazine who is the president of digital services at Cablevision.

As Mr. Cece showed off his new service in Manhattan yesterday, he lingered over one feature -- a traffic monitoring service that allows subscribers to get information about tie-ups on various highways like the Long Island Expressway and the Northern State Parkway. If Cablevision's subscribers cannot get anywhere fast on Long Island, Mr. Cece said, at least they will find out quickly how slow their trip is going to be.