Article

DSL: Is it up to speed?

Although DSL is cheap and fast, it can also be a problem for kiosk systems that rely on it.

March 18, 2002

Digital Subscriber Line technology offers 24/7-connectivity, a reasonable cost and the bandwidth to support innovative, multi-media kiosk content. So why aren't more kiosks using this technology?

Kiosk solution providers say the main obstacles to DSL use in the industry are availability, reliability and competing technologies.

No service

Cody Catalena, senior vice president and chief technology officer of College Station, Texas-based kiosk service and software provider NetNearU, is a fan of DSL. Due to the remote location of many of the public Internet access machines NetNearU supports, however, he's had to rely primarily on dial-up connections. In his local market, he's had no problems obtaining DSL connections. But in many areas, it simply isn't available.
 
"That is a drawback," Catalena said. "Our experience with DSL has been good - in the scenarios where we can get it."

It's a theme reiterated by others in the kiosk business.

"The majority of our customers are using wireless and 56-k (modem) dial-up," said Pete Snyder, vice president of Broomfield, Colo.-based kiosk manufacturer, KIS. "The problem is not all of areas of the country are DSL configured."

Since DSL works over the same phone lines used by voice, one would expect the service to be readily available. The reason it isn't is due to two problems, distance limitations and lack of telephone company support, according to Hal Roberts, a networking expert with Communications Services International(CSI), which installs and provides service for kiosks, ATMs and other data networks.

Out of range

DSL technology is limited to an area of about four miles from the telephone company's central office. According to DSL Reports, about 50 percent of the people in the U.S. cannot receive DSL, in part because they are too far from a central office.

However, Roberts contended that the distance limitation could be circumvented, if phone companies wanted to. To provide voice service in rural areas, telephone companies create a kind of mini central office by combining several small community lines into one big pipe and sending it to the real central office. This approach could be used for DSL, he said.
 
"The way in which telephone companies operate is very often simply perverse," Roberts said. "They won't let you do what is reasonable to do if you want to do it, but they do it themselves."

Too cheap

Roberts said telephone companies generally do not advocate DSL because it can be purchased at a fraction of the cost of ISDN, T1 or T3 lines. Like, DSL, these lines have greater data capacity than dialup modems.

A DSL line can be obtained for the price of a standard phone line, plus anywhere from

For networking terms check out our Connectivity and Software glossaries.

$30 to around $200, depending on the service level agreement; an ISDN, T1 or T3 line can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars a month.

"DSL, in effect, allowed somebody to have that high speed communications for really hardly more than a line charge," Roberts said. "The telephone companies didn't exactly like the advent of DSL. They tried to make it very difficult for anyone to put in DSL by locating equipment necessary to do it in their central offices."

A general outcry from public utility commissions has swayed many companies to offer DSL, but they still have done a lot to hinder its expansion, he stated.

Roberts is not the only one to fault telcos. Boston-based research firm, Gartner also noticed a general malaise about DSL in its commentary, "The DSL market missed its first crucial step."

"Although U.S. federal law mandates that ILECs (incumbent local exchange carriers) must lease lines to CLECs (competitive local exchange carriers), it does not mandate that they must be helpful," the report states. "As a result, users can experience delays of months to get basic DSL service established."

ILECs are simply local telephone companies. CLECs can refer to any organization other

Unsure if DSL is in your area? A quick, free way to find out is to use DSL Reports' online service search.

than a traditional telephone company, such as a university or large corporation, that sells phone service as well as provides service for its office operations.

Installation woes

Even if DSL is available, there may be problems installing it. For example, there may not be a business-class solution in the area or the provider might renege, or worse, go out of business.

DSL subscribers complain of lengthy installation times. According to a poll from DSL Reports, implementations can range from one week to more than 10 weeks.

Left off the hook

Tales of DSL implementations gone wrong increase the reluctance of companies to pursue this option for kiosks. Roberts cited a credit union that had attempted to install kiosks to link its branches to the central office. Assured that DSL was available, the credit union planned to use DSL for 80 percent of its kiosks.

But when it was time to obtain the service, the credit union ran into complications. Roberts said that the DSL provider was unable to finish the project. Finally, a wireless company stepped in to provide a solution.

According to Robert Ventresca, director of marketing at Netkey, a kiosk software provider based in Branford, Conn., another issue is the problem finding a business-class DSL provider. Ventresca previously worked for DSL.net, a DSL solution provider that now helps Netkey provide DSL for kiosks.

The answer, Ventresca said, is to find a DSL provider that offers a solid service agreement.

"You don't want to hear that your system's going to be down for any period of time," he said. "That leads to (asking) what sort of redundancy does the provider have."

Ventresca advised kiosk providers to ask:

• Does the provider have peering agreements with multiple backbone providers?
• What sort of service do they have available if connectivity does go down?
• How quickly the company send someone to make repairs?
• Do they have a network operations center where they're monitoring their service and making sure that 24/7 that service is up?

Another chapter: 11

Even finding a good provider won't guarantee success. Numerous independent providers have eliminated their DSL coverage areas, in some cases giving only a few weeks notice. This month Covad Communications Group, which serves 330,000 customers, more than 50 percent of which are businesses, declared bankruptcy.

"Around the country, many independent DSL providers, like NorthPoint for example, and many others, found the going really hard," Roberts said. "They couldn't get the people in there, the telephone companies were keeping them from getting their equipment deployed where it needed to be and they've gone belly-up."

It's hard to know who will survive and who won't, according to Amy Craven, an analyst with Cahners In-Stat Group and author of the report, "John Q. Public Gets Connected: The Emerging Public Space Broadband Access Market."

"At this point in the game, nothing is guaranteed," Craven said. "This is a relatively new arena. Those that are providing service to these public locations are often start-up types, and the business models are still being formulated and market position determined."

Alternatives

The kiosk makers and solution providers interviewed reported that the majority of their customers rely on dialup or wireless connectivity. Ultimately, they said, these solutions are friendlier for kiosks than DSL.

Snyder, of KIS, said most of his customers request that he install wireless or modems for dialup access.

"Almost anything going into malls or large store complexes are wireless," he said. "Wireless is getting pretty good. It's getting a pretty nice bandwidth these days. You've got 11 MB (megabits per second), which is darn good."

It's also difficult to make a business case for DSL unless the kiosks are highly interactive or must frequently access the Internet.

"Typically, the downloads that are needed in order to give you any kind of the fancy graphics in a kiosk can all be downloaded at a very slow speed in the middle of the night and then the next day they look like they've just arrived at 1.544 Mega bits," said Roberts.

Roberts said that an additional problem with DSL is that there's no notification system for discerning if there's a real problem with your kiosk or whether DSL is simply down.

The future

Cahners' Amy Craven said that right now, bandwidth is not a pressing concern for kiosks.

"Bandwidth management has not yet been as big of an issue in the public access market," she explained. "However, as other services are introduced-i.e. video and tiered services-this will be more important."

As the public grows more accustomed to multi-media and impressive graphics, kiosks will have to adapt. Netkey's Ventresca said as that happens, companies will use many different technologies to provide more interesting content. DSL, with its low cost and high-bandwidth, might be only part of the solution.
 
"The ability to move large amounts of information very quickly to a kiosk where an end user can get that information is going to be a pretty important part of making sure that kiosk is successful for you," Ventresca said. "It's going to be an amalgam of everything. You can have a component of people who are able to deploy DSL and do that effectively because that is a solution that is available there and it serves that particular need."