Broadband options: high-speed Internet choices for businesses are growing.

• Author: Lewers, Christine
• Position: Information Technolgy - Brief Article

As a member of Kokomo's DSL ask force, Mike Miller knows how important broadband services are to the economic development of his community.

"People who are looking to relocate evaluate a town's high-speed Internet access," he says, adding that as few as five years ago this criterion might not have made most companies' top 10 lists. "It's a really big deal. Communities that don't have it are going to fall behind."

The same might be said of companies. As president of the consulting firm Miller & Miller Information Management Systems, Miller works with clients to develop telecommunications solutions that can be integrated with local area networks. This often includes choosing a broadband supplier--something that, on its own, can be a confusing prospect for businesses, especially small to mid-sized companies.

Rapidly changing technologies, recent financial turmoil and heated competition in broadband services might have turned companies off from shopping for high-speed Internet access and other broadband services, says Miller. However, now's a good time to buy, he and other industry experts say, even though sorting out the options might be confusing.

A good place to start is with a basic understanding of the technology. In general, broadband technology includes anything that can deliver speeds greater than traditional analog dial-up connections that max out at 56K (kilobits per second).

To date, DSL (digital subscriber line) is the dominant mode of commercial broadband services because it uses twisted pairs of copper telephone lines, with which businesses are already wired. Because it involves digital technology, it's more reliable than analog and delivers speeds from about 128K to about 1.5M (megabits per second). The major drawbacks of DSL are limited availability and speeds that degrade with distance from central offices.

The big providers of DSL are local telephone companies. In Indiana the biggest are SBC Ameritech, Verizon and Sprint. They face competition from competitive local exchange carriers (GLECs), which are permitted by law to have access to networks owned by telephone companies for resale purposes.

A company that competes with Ameritech is eGIX, headquartered in Garmel. In December 2001 the company signed colocation agreements giving it access to 42 Ameritech central offices in Indiana and central Illinois. eGix is targeting its broadband services to small to midsized businesses.

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