BusinessReport.com

Not a long time ago, in a galaxy pretty much right here, businesses did the most unusual things. Television providers offered only television services to people. Customers looking to communicate by telephone sent a monthly check in an envelope affixed with a 29-cent Skinny Elvis stamp to a telephone company.

Then, in an effort to combat global warming, Al Gore invented the Internet, a series of tubes that allowed people who learned computers to hop onto the information superhighway in search of tax-free shopping and, occasionally, anonymous adult entertainment and the secret to anatomical enhancement.

It wasn’t long before Web-savvy youngsters discovered that there was free stuff to be had by sharing files with software designed to allow users access to music downloads. This process angered the members of Metallica, who were upset that the increased Internet use made it slower for them to e-mail pictures of their grandchildren to band mates.

It was during this time that companies began wising up.

We can also offer Internet and phone services, said the cable companies.

You know, said the telephone providers, we can use our technology to offer Internet and television services.

All the while, the Internet tubes were beginning to clog as more and more people were downloading files of sizes previously unimagined by the Web’s founding fathers. And, as the human race was wont to do at the time, people were stressing the infrastructure further with the creation of YouTube, a Web site where users uploaded videos of themselves doing unfortunate things for the entertainment of others.

What resulted were companies battling to provide the fastest service to customers—a voice, video and data arms race not seen since Star Wars.

Light speed

EATEL launched its telephone services in Ascension Parish in 1935, using a network of copper wire. Nearly 70 years later, the company began the search for other options to offer customers.

“We knew high-definition was going to be the big thing,” says Ashley Phillips, the company’s director of network engineering and operations. But the company also came to two other conclusions: Copper wire was not going to have the capacity to handle future technology, and fiber-optic technology was not yet a viable option.

Fiber optics, which use non-visible light frequencies to transmit information, had a long-standing role in connecting large networks. But the technology was cost-prohibitive when it came to bringing fiber to the customers.

In 2004, the company decided to make the move away from copper in order to offer higher speeds to customers. “We knew we had to go out and do something with the network, and the fiber made perfect sense to us,” Phillips says.

The key component to EATEL’s service is its fiber to the home feature, which provides each customer with a dedicated fiber-optic wire, meaning that a customer’s usage will not be affected by others’ level of activity.

The fiber to the home provides voice, video and data services on three different wavelengths, or colors, of light through a process known as coarse wave division multiplexing.

There is the possibility in the future of going to dense wave division multiplexing, which allows for more frequencies that are more closely bunched. However, it is requires more sensitive electronics, which, as expected, are more expensive.

While EATEL can help customers get onto the Internet, the user is still at the mercy of whatever bandwidth the particular Web sites have to offer. Phillips likens it to users having their own dedicated roads to the airport, but having to wait on the particular airlines to get them to their flights.

Digital facelift

Cox Communications added phone service to its cable television and Internet selections locally in 2005. The Atlanta-based company is investing $500 million into its Baton Rouge and Acadiana markets to update its network with larger bandwidths to provide faster services. Much of the work is increasing the amplification in the network, which keeps the frequency of the information being sent at a higher level. In other cases, the company is bringing fiber-optic technology closer to the customer.

“We’ll always need a robust fiber backbone,” Cox spokesperson Sharon Kleinpeter says. “We’re always upgrading to make sure it’s the latest and the greatest.”

One of the challenges for Cox is that it’s a private company. In order to raise the money it needs for such endeavors, it has to convince creditors that whatever is being put in place will provide a return on investment where the money can be repaid. In this instance, however, Cox is viewing the upgrade as a long-term investment that will not be passed to customers in the form of a rate increase.

Part of the local upgrades is Cox’s new PowerBoost service, which uses the additional capacity on its fiber-optic network to provide higher speeds when customers are downloading large files. The technology detects when a large file begins to download and gives the user a short burst additional speed. For Cox preferred customers that means a boost to 9 Mbps from 7 Mbps and for Premier customers it will be an increase to 15 Mpbs from 12 Mpbs.

Another of the expanding technologies on Cox’s drawing board is to increase the usage of a wireless network. The technology, currently being tested on the West Coast, will provide users with such services as being able to control a digital video recorder via cell phone.

Says Kleinpeter: “We like to lead the pack when we can.”