Today's report from CED/Broadband Week Staff

Editor's Note: CED Broadband Direct will not publish on Thursday, July 4 and Friday, July 5, in observance of the Independence Day holiday. Daily news will return on Monday, July 8.

• Fiber comes home in Wisconsin

• Blonder-Tongue to purchase private cable system

• S-A restructures manufacturing;
CSFB cuts price target

• Quicker downloads on way for premium RCN customers

• AT&T offers paperless bills

• Tut scores new hotel deal

• Study reveals widespread customer service problems

• Broadband briefs

Fiber comes home in Wisconsin

Cable operators say they don't need to run fiber to the home, but competitive telecommunications companies are starting to jump on the all-fiber bandwagon. Fiber-to-the-home equipment manufacturer Optical Solutions Inc. has won yet another contract from a regional telecom company. This time, it's Baldwin Telecom Inc. of western Wisconsin that plans to deliver voice, video and data services to homes in new housing developments located within Baldwin's 135-square mile service area there.

BTI will become the first independent telephone company in the state of Wisconsin to deploy FTTH technology. This is also the first FTTH deployment in Wisconsin to be funded by USDA Rural Utilities Service (RUS).

The first development to receive fiber-optic services will be the "Prairie View" addition of nearby Woodville, which is being designed by Humphrey Engineering of Woodville and developed by French Homes of Hammond, Wis. Baldwin is installing Optical Solutions' FiberPath 400 system, which delivers multiple phone lines, high-speed data, and hundreds of analog or digital entertainment television options to each subscriber's home.

Optical Solutions' gear incorporates a passive optical network to deliver voice, video and high-speed data to the home.

Blonder-Tongue to purchase private cable system

Equipment manufacturer Blonder Tongue Laboratories Inc. has formed a joint venture with Priority Systems LLC and Paradigm Capital Investments LLC to acquire several thousand cable TV subscribers from Verizon Communications who reside in multiple dwelling units.

The joint venture entity, called Priority Systems Group LLC, intends to purchase the Verizon systems, which are comprised of approximately 4,350 existing subscribers and 9,500 passings.

Priority will pay $575 per subscriber, which Blonder Tongue will guarantee. The actual subscriber count and purchase price will be determined on the final closing date, which is anticipated to occur around Sept. 1, 2002. The Systems are expected to be cash flow positive in the first year.

Because the MDU segment of the cable television market suffers from high theft of service and high churn, Blonder Tongue intends to upgrade the buildings with its own equipment, including Triple QT digital and interdiction addressable signal control.

"After completing the upgrade, we will have a showcase and blueprint for all cable operators who want to deploy in the MDU environment and achieve the highest possible penetration, sell-through and customer satisfaction," claimed James Luksch, president and CEO of Blonder Tongue.

Priority Systems is privately owned and has been operating private cable systems and providing billing services since 1985. It has roughly 5,500 subscribers and provides billing services to 6,500 additional subscribers on behalf of other cable operators.

S-A restructures manufacturing; CSFB cuts price target

Adelphia's Communications' much-documented woes, combined with the general economic malaise, has forced Scientific-Atlanta to shut down its third production shift at its Juarez, Mexico facility, resulting in the elimination of approximately 1,300 positions, or approximately 30 percent of the company's employees there, the company announced.

Company officials said current economic conditions have resulted in a softening in demand for equipment built there, including set-top boxes. Spokesmen further said that S-A is evaluating the need for any additional restructuring in other parts of the company due to reduced demand for our products.

Meanwhile, Credit Suisse First Boston said on Tuesday it cut its price target for S-A to $18 from $23 because of concerns about demand for the set-top-box and cable equipment maker's products.

CSFB said in a research note that it did not see enough of an uptick in spending at S-A customers to offset the impact of the bankruptcy of Adelphia. CSFB said it only expects modest incremental transmission business for Scientific-Atlanta from AT&T Broadband for the remainder of the 2002 with no sales for transmission systems to Adelphia or Callahan Associates until the second half of next year.

The investment firm cut its fiscal fourth quarter estimate for S-A to earnings of 23 cents per share from its previous estimate of 28 cents per share on revenue of $420 million, down from its previous estimate of $445 million. CSFB expects the company to earn 98 cents per share in 2003 compared with its earlier estimate of $1.28 per share on revenue of $1.65 billion compared with an earlier $1.82 billion forecast.

Quicker downloads on way for premium RCN customers

RCN, one of the few remaining competitive bundled service providers to offer service in America's largest cities, announced that select customers in its Los Angeles and San Francisco markets have been upgraded to download speeds of more than 3 Mbps.

Customers who subscribe to RCN's Gold and Platinum ResiLink service platforms are already receiving the extra download performance, what the company calls MegaModem, as a standard package feature. Customers in San Francisco and L.A. who take the more basic Mercury or Bronze service packages can get the super-charged service for an additional $10 a month.

RCN representatives praised their engineering teams for enabling the new network performance threshold. Much of the improvement in download performance was attributed to better use of power and capacity within RCN's fiber optic network. "We didn't have to spend a lot of capital on this. It was elbow grease on the part of our engineers," explains RCN spokesperson Pamela Faatz.

This latest announcement is indicative of RCN's strategy to differentiate its service mix through better technology. In May, the company introduced an advanced dial-up technology, called V.92, which can yield data rates improved by as much as 60 percent and shorter dial-up times to establish a connection. While the new MegaModem service is available in just two of RCN's current cities, V.92 is available in almost two-thirds of RCN's national markets.

AT&T offers paperless bills

If you hate the taste of postage stamps, or you're simply tired of writing and mailing countless checks each month to pay your bills, AT&T Broadband's new Online Bill Pay program may be just the thing for you.

Now, AT&T customers who subscribe to the company's Internet and video services can pay their monthly bills over the Internet. Registered customers, in addition to being able to access their accounts anytime, can pay their bills online by credit card, debit card or electronic fund transfer from a checking or savings account. Once registered, customers can view current and past billing statements, enroll in recurring payment plans, make one-time payments, or change their statement delivery method as well.

AT&T Broadband customers interested in the new Internet payment program can go to http://help.broadband.att.com to sign up.

Tut scores new hotel deal

Here in the U.S., the race to wire the thousands of multi-tenant (MTU) and multi-dwelling (MDU) buildings isn't exactly heating up. The reasons range from untested technology to sluggish network build-outs to uncooperative property owners, and many providers are looking first to the hospitality industry to provide momentum.

Tut Systems, developers of advanced VDSL systems for the MDU/MTU market, announced a recent deal with Internet service provider Broadband Hospitality to use some of Tut's infrastructure products.

Broadband Hospitality will use Tut's baseline Expresso gear to serve many of the hotels the company has under contract. Currently, that amounts to about 40,000 hotel rooms across Ohio, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Florida and other regions in the central and eastern U.S. It'll use Tut's Expresso SMS 2000 subscriber management system and the Expresso OCS operation center software system to provide customized Web sites, online advertising and reservation capabilities, as well as bandwidth distribution and tiered service pricing. Broadband Hospitality has installed Expresso in 10 hotels to date, with plans to deploy in 35 more by year's end.

Study reveals widespread customer service problems

Broadband continues on a path to relative ubiquity, but new study findings are showing that customer service and support may be lagging behind broadband's overall growth.

One new study, a Harris Poll survey commissioned by service software provider Motive Communications, reflects the trend. The study found that of the 30 percent of Americans who access the Internet though a broadband connection, more than half complained about problems with customer service.

More troubling was the discovery that 90 percent didn't plan on buying new services from their current provider. However, 45 percent surveyed did express general interest in new services like games, music, streaming video and home networking.

Among the customer service problems cited: 20 percent said it took their provider too long to solve their problems; 33 percent said it took multiple tries to solve their broadband access issues; and 7 percent claimed their problems were never solved at all.

More bad news from the Motive study: a full 23 percent said that based on their broadband experience, they would consider switching to a different provider or canceling their high-speed Internet service altogether. Ouch.

Broadband briefs:

• Marconi/HP to bring broadband to Latin America

Marconi and HP are teaming to bring broadband equipment and services to Central and Latin America. The agreement allows each company to partner with the other to jointly deliver the two companies' products and services to customers in the region.

Marconi will provide products and engineering services for both wireless and wireline networks. Marconi products include optical, broadband switching, access and power. HP will provide systems and network management integration, operations support systems (OSS), network operations center (NOC) and billing services.

• DVB-MHP receivers ready to roll

Manufacturers of equipment that adheres to the international DVB-MHP standard should soon be able to formally test their gear for conformance and interoperability now that the DVB Steering Board has approved the Multimedia Home Platform Test Suite.

Companies will shortly be able to run the tests on their MHP implementations and gain the right to use the MHP logo.

With the approval of the MHP Test Suite, digital TV broadcasters can soon begin rolling out standards-based applications and interactive services on digital TV receivers.

Theo Peek, DVB chairman, said,"The Test Suite enables the many different equipment manufacturers, broadcasters and service operators to produce MHP products and services that will work together in a reliable and predictable way. The first receivers are to be launched initially in the German and Scandinavian markets during autumn 2002."