Excite to offer high-speed Net service

Excite@Home broke ranks with the cable industry Tuesday, announcing that it will offer high-speed residential Internet services via phone lines to as many as 15.3 million homes over the next two years - beginning with parts of New York City and Los Angeles.

An affiliate, @Home Solutions, agreed to provide Internet connections and content through Rhythms NetConnections in communities where the local cable operator isn't affiliated with Excite@Home. Rhythms offers digital subscriber line (DSL) services in 46 markets. That could make AT&T-controlled Excite@Home a competitor to high-speed offerings in systems owned by Time Warner, Charter and Adelphia.

Excite@Home made the deal to broaden its reach, via cable and phone lines, to two-thirds of U.S. homes. That will help it launch a national marketing campaign. It now has access to about 60 million homes via AT&T and deals with Cox, Comcast and other cable firms. And Excite@Home says it will announce other deals, including with other DSL providers, to keep growing.

"This is the first of several platform extensions," says Adam Grosser, president of subscriber networks for Excite@Home.

Pricing for the new service hasn't been determined, although Grosser says it will be competitive with other cable and phone offerings. He says the average transmission speed will probably be 256 kilobits per second to 384 kbps.

That's much faster than today's conventional 56 kbps phone connections, but slower than many cable Internet services.

But Excite@Home's DSL service will not have the same 10-minute limit on video transmissions that applies to its cable-provided service.

"Cable operators imposed that to ensure Excite@Home didn't compete with cable," Grosser says. "We obviously don't have that restriction with DSL."

Investors in @Home Solutions include Microsoft and Motorola.

Reported by USA Today, http://tech.usatoday.com.