Profiting From the Broadband Revolution
After years of hype and false starts, we can finally declare it: The Age of Broadband is here. It may have arrived with little of the fanfare first envisioned at the height of the tech investing bubble. But it has something more important than buzz. It has critical mass.
By the end of this year, about 22.5 million households in the U.S. will have high-speed Internet access, or 21% of all households nationwide, according to the Yankee Group, a Boston consulting firm; by 2008, about half of all residences are expected to have a broadband hookup. Meanwhile, at the end of this year, some 7.4 million businesses will have the speedy connections.
That's a lot of people, and it's already having a huge effect on what we see and do online. Video and music increasingly are becoming the norm, and consumers are quickly warming to high-speed e-commerce. In fact, those who move to high-speed pipes are three times as likely to download videos as those beholden to the slowpoke speeds of dial-up modems, according to a survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, a Washington nonprofit organization that studies the impact of the Internet.
The minutiae of daily life are changing, too, says Jed Kolko , an analyst at Forrester Research Inc., a research firm in Cambridge, Mass. A world where broadband dominates "is a world where computers and the Internet are involved in more and more of our mundane transactions," says Mr. Kolko. "Things like checking flight status, movie times, bank balances."
Perhaps broadband's greatest economic effect will be the hardest to measure: that as a catalyst for all kinds of offline behavior. People who have high-speed connections, for instance, are more likely to buy new digital cameras, using their speedy connections to send digital photos to friends and family. They're also more likely to buy home-networking equipment, such as Wi-Fi cards, to share the bandwidth among multiple PCs.
What Is Broadband, Anyway?
All this has happened despite there being no consensus of what broadband truly means. Originally a technical term meaning a device that can carry a wide band of radio frequencies, broadband now stands for a motley set of high-speed technologies as well as those applications that run over those devices. Nominally, this involves data transmitted at a rate of 256 or more kilobits per second.
The definitions go from there. There is the new "3G" cellphone that acts as a high-speed wireless connection for a laptop, enabling users, for instance, to download huge Powerpoint presentations from the back of a taxi. There is the videogame system that connects kung-fu video warriors around the globe. Call it broadband. And there are the Web sites that stream music videos and record albums to the desktop over cable modems. Broadband, too.
Luckily for consumers, a host of companies are locked in a hotly competitive battle to bring high-speed wires into their homes.
Phone, cable, satellite and wireless companies all want control over the $15 billion broadband-access market. That has driven prices down about 20% a year over the past two years. Consumers can now pay just $30 to $35 a month to get a digital subscriber line from a large phone company such as Verizon Communications Inc. or SBC Communications Inc. Those prices have dropped from about $45 or $50 per month just earlier this year.
More ... for a Fee
The broadband masses also have spurred a new generation of fee-based information and entertainment services that are improvements to the free offerings still available online.
For instance, fans of the Chicago Cubs can pay just a few dollars per month to access video feeds of their beloved team direct from the Major League Baseball Web site (
www.mlb.com). Before, they had to make do with online radio broadcasts or sit through ESPN's SportsCenter TV show. But with so many fans thousands of miles from their home teams, Major League Baseball saw an opportunity to serve them, rolling out its first video service last fall. It has attracted more than 100,000 customers for various subscriptions through the 2003 season. More than a million people pay a monthly fee to RealNetworks Inc. for access to its collection of video and audio programs, such as news clips from CNN and audio from National Basketball Association games.
Apple Computer Inc.'s successful iTunes site (
www.apple.com/itunes) has proved that some broadband users are willing to pay for music they had come to expect to be free on file-sharing services.
Of course, most broadband users who download music continue to do so illegally. And, indeed, broadband has not proved a boon for everyone in the technology business. Suffering most is AOL Time Warner Inc.'s America Online Internet service, which built up its 35 million subscribers on dial-up accounts, and is losing customers at a rate of 9,400 a day, most of them to other broadband providers.
Also suffering are the large telephone companies, which are losing their high-margin second phone lines to low-margin broadband connections. And although it might seem that telecom-equipment companies would benefit from broadband's growth, the business has been widely commoditized and abandoned by some of the chief industry players.
Evolution and Integration
Regardless of these economic roadblocks, nobody doubts that broadband will continue its evolution and its integration into everyday life. Consider Vernon Rivet, a 25-year-old employee at a computer store in Maynard, Mass.
Mr. Rivet hasn't used a phone book in ages. He instead turns to his home PC, which has an "always-on" connection to online White Pages via a high-speed cable modem. Recently, a friend invited Mr. Rivet to play an online World War II videogame called Battlefield 1942. He's even considering using his broadband Internet connection to make free voice phone calls.
Spending time on the Net "is not my whole life," says Mr. Rivet. "But it's definitely become more and more as time goes on."
Customers at the computer store where he works often ask Mr. Rivet whether they should get a broadband connection or not.
He doesn't hesitate. "I tell them I love it," he says.
宽带时代到来
经过多年的大肆渲染并经历了初期的不规范运作之后，我们终于可以宣布：宽带时代到来了。它的到来并非如高科技投资泡沫高涨时期展望的那样大张旗鼓，但带著某些更重要的东西，已经由量变转为质变。
据波士顿的咨询公司Yankee Group统计，到今年年底，将有约2,250万美国居民接入宽带网，占全美住户总数的21%。预计到2008年，约有半数的居民实现宽带上网。同时在今年年底，大约740万企业接入宽带。
这样的数字相当不小的了，而且已经对我们上网时的见闻和行为产生了巨大影响。网上影像和音乐日益常见，消费者对高速电子商务青睐程度迅速增加。实际上，根据华盛顿研究互联网影响的非赢利组织Pew Internet and American Life Project调查，那些转而使用宽带网的人下载影像的可能性是低速拨号上网者的三倍。
马萨诸塞州坎布里奇的研究机构Forrester Research Inc.分析师Jed Kolko指出，日常生活中的细节也在发生改变。在以宽带为主宰的世界，"电脑和互联网越来越多融入到了我们的日常交易中。像查询航班班次，电影播放时间，银行余额等都可在网上完成。"
或许宽带带给我们最大的经济影响将是最难以计量的，那就是它充当了我们在离线时所有种种行为的催化剂。例如，接入了高速互联网的用户更可能购买新型数码相机，利用高速的网络向亲朋发送数码照片。他们还更可能购买如Wi-Fi卡等家用网络设备，以实现宽带互联网在多台个人电脑间的共享。
什么是宽带？
对于宽带究竟是什么并无定论，但一切变化已经发生了。最初作为一个技术术语，它表示一个能承载很宽一段无线电频率的设施，而现在却代表著一系列各式各样高速网络技术和这些设施运行的应用程序。从名义上讲，这其中包括以256K或更高速度传输的数据。
宽带一词的定义由此而来。例如，可进行高速无线上网的新型3G蜂窝式电话，让用户坐在出租车上就能下载巨大的Powerpoint演示文稿。一种电子游戏系统能将全球的功夫游戏爱好者连系在一起。这就叫宽带。网站将音乐节目录像和唱片通过电缆调制解调器并入电脑中，这也有赖于宽带的作用。
对客户来说幸运的是，许多公司卷入了这场竞争激烈的宽带之战，争相把自己的高速网线接入客户家中。
电话，电缆，卫星和无线公司都希望在150亿美元的宽带接入市场上取得控制地位，因而在过去两年中接入费用每年下降了20%。如今，消费者每月支付30-35美元就可以从Verizon Communications Inc.或SBC Communications Inc.接入数字订户线路(DSL)，价格较今年早些时候的45或50美元相比也有所下降。 收费服务增加
宽带的普及还刺激了新一代收费信息和娱乐服务的发展。相对于仍存在于网上的免费服务，其质量有所改善。
例如，Chicago Cubs爱好者要直接在美国职棒大联盟(Major League Baseball)网站(ww.mlb.com)上看到他们喜爱球队的录像片每月只须支付几美元，而以前，他们必须想方设法收听网上广播或坐在电视机前收看ESPN体育频道的SportsCenter节目。但由于许多爱好者与主队距离遥远，美国职棒大联盟注意到这个为球迷服务的机会，于去年秋季首次推出了视频服务，在2002-2003赛季吸引了订阅内容五花八门的订户超过10万人。有超过100万人为支付月费收看RealNetworks Inc.的视频和音频节目，如有线电视新闻网(CNN)和美国国家篮球协会(National Baseball Association)的新闻剪辑。
苹果电脑(Apple Computer Inc.)iTunes网站(
www.apple.com/itunes)的成功证实，一些宽带用户愿意为他们以往期望免费的共享服务付费。
当然，大多数宽带用户仍在非法下载音乐。而且宽带并非对科技领域任何人都意味著福音。遭受打击最沉重的是美国在线时代华纳(AOL Time Warner Inc.)旗下的美国在线互联网服务，该公司已拥有拨号上网用户3,500万人，而现在以平均每天9,400人的速度流失，其中大多数转向了其他宽带供应商。
同时遭受打击的还有大型电话公司，因为宽带接入业务利润不高，而给客户安装第二条电话线则具有较高利润。另外，尽管电话设备公司看似将从宽带的增长中受益，但宽带业务很大程度上已经商品化，一些大型电话设备公司放弃了这一业务。
演化和整合
尽管经济上存在这种种阻碍，但没有人怀疑宽带的发展和整合将继续下去，融入我们的日常生活。让我们以马萨诸塞州梅纳德一家电脑商店25岁的职员莱瑞特(Vernon Rivet)为例。
Rivet先生多年来一直未使用电话簿，而是通过高速电缆调制解调器使用永远在线的网上用户信息数据库。最近，一个朋友邀请Rivet先生一起打第二次世界大战的在线游戏《战场1942年》(Battlefield 1942)。他甚至考虑用自己的宽带互联网拨打免费的语音电话。
莱瑞特先生说："网上冲浪不是我生活的全部，但随著时间的推移，花费在网上的时间肯定越来越多。"
他所在这家电脑商店的客户常常问莱瑞特先生他们是否应该接入宽带网。他毫不犹豫地告诉他们："我喜欢宽带。"
