'Infobahn' Still a Distant Prospect

Only two things kept Time Warner Cable's ambitious "full-service network" from being ready to roll out to subscribers in Orlando, Florida, on time next month: The hardware and the software.


That may sound glib -- after all, what's left? But it's a fair description of the delays facing not only Time Warner, but the rest of the companies attempting to build the nation's first video-based information highways.


Technical problems are being reported from all quarters. None of these problems are major, or even unanticipated, say the engineers involved. But the glitches will take time to unknot, undoubtedly cooling the public's anticipation of the two-way networks that will let people dial up movies on demand, shop at home and otherwise cavort on the so-called infobahn (yes, that's the latest buzzword for the information highway).


Jim Chiddix, the Time Warner Cable vice president in charge of technology overseeing the Orlando project, said Wednesday that it was a "daring step" to announce, more than a year ago, that the Orlando network would be operational by next month.


"As we got closer to April, it became clear we could cobble something together as a demo," he said, "but that would be a distraction" from doing other work needed to deploy the system to 4,000 subscribers as planned. "So, we decided to flush it."


One problem was the late shipping of custom-made integrated circuits that will be the brains of the television-top devices that are central to the network, he said. The set-top boxes, made by Scientific-Atlanta Inc., are the gateway between the television and the network itself, which transmits computer code.


Another problem was that "software development has not progressed as fast as we had hoped," Chiddix said. Asked whether the software development he referred to was in the set-top boxes or the powerful computers that will route traffic on the network, Chiddix said, "both ... it's more complex than we had envisioned a year ago."


Chiddix said, however, that "nothing we have learned along the way has told us there are any fundamental problems. In fact, it's all been very encouraging." Indeed, Time Warner officials say the network was successfully demonstrated in December, when a movie, "The Fugitive," was converted to the digital ones and zeros of computer language, squeezed into a small burst of computer bits and piped down the network to a TV screen, where a viewer could watch it, pause it and even rewind it, as if it were on a video cassette recorder.


Some analysts, like Mark Stahlman, president of New York City-based New Media Associates, are skeptical of the whole notion of information highways. In fact, Stahlman says the idea the "full-service network" planned by Time Warner is not only flawed from a demand perspective -- people like to leave the house to shop for goods as well as videos, he argues -- it's flawed from a technical standpoint, too.


"It'll be far too expensive to deliver for a long time in an adequate fashion," Stahlman said, claiming that Time Warner is spending $15,000 per subscriber in Orlando. That's a lot of movies on demand.


Chiddix would not say how much the project is costing per subscriber, arguing that the prototype network would obviously cost a lot more than a final "production" network.


"The cost of prototyping is irrelevant," he said. "The question is what will it cost ... when there's a volume market out there." He said that Time Warner believes it will ultimately cost about $300 per subscriber.