__ Chatting with @Home's Milo Medin about the AT&T broadband colossus. __
__ Phone company buys cable giant owns high-speed ISP buys Internet portal: Is this what they meant by convergence? Whatever you call it, the mess of content and cables, voices and bits, is converging around Milo Medin. In four years, the voluble @Home CTO has built his TCI-majority-owned venture into a broadband cable company with a $15 billion market cap and 330,000 customers in 59 North American markets. Medin still complains about missing the "one-of-a-kind problems" of his NASA engineering days, stumpers like how to build real-time interplanetary networks. But there's plenty of brain-bending in the world of networks he occupies today. In late January, @Home agreed to acquire portal powerhouse Excite for $6.7 billion in stock in the biggest deal in Internet history - an acquisition that should be complete in April, just in time for TCI to be swallowed up by long distance giant AT&T. Medin marches into the 21st century charged with merging the companies' wildly disparate technologies into the largest end-to-end broadband network on the planet. __
Wired: With AT&T preparing to reach out via cable, you're the guy charged with sending Grandma's phone calls down Sonny's cable TV pipes. How will that be done?
Medin: In most cases, dedicated boxes will be installed on the side of your house. These convert your phone call into a data signal that can be carried over the cable network. At the TCI head end, data is taken off the line and formatted for a conventional voice network like AT&T and then sent down that pipe [to the recipient]. Of course, to guarantee fault-proof phone service, the network also needs robust, reliable power. So we may put in new generators or other power supplies, too.
Won't the challenge of integrating AT&T/TCI nets slow rollout?
No - it will speed broadband deployment. AT&T has earmarked $4-5 billion in additional capital, management talent, and general resources to upgrade cable plants for voice. Since data services don't have the same power requirements as voice, we'll be ready for broadband data before voice.
You have a bit of a brand crisis building. What will your new logo be - AT&TCI@HomExcite?
Yeah, it'll look like a race car! On the broadband side, it's going to be Cox@Home or TCI@Home or now AT&T@Home. On the narrowband, network-content side, that's a very important question. The last thing you want to do is to screw up the whole reason you bought Excite.
What's so great about a portal?
For a long time I thought, Why do people like these things? They give you email, directory functions, maybe some better knobs on search engines, and Web space in which you can publish. So what's the deal here? But people like portals because they actually move information into the network. They don't have to worry about having their mail client set up on a neighbor's PC to read their email. They don't have to dial in through a certain phone number to get to their favorite bookmarks. It's portable.
What's been missed about the @Home-Excite deal?
That this is not just a play about better advertising, though certainly Excite gives you that. It's not just about personalizing your homepage, but yeah, that's something that Excite will bring to our subscribers. It's not even about being able to share infrastructure and reduce cost. The really big deal about Excite is the network-centricity of not just your data, but of your community.
Explain.
With Excite, we want to push the portal model into community relationships. Imagine that your friends can look at certain parts of your calendar and share information online. You can do group decisionmaking. You can videoconference. And the system knows where your friends are and how to bring them together.
Obviously, AOL is a big threat. Where do you see your advantage?
Well, we have a network. Having a network is critical for being able to offer the kinds of services that we intend. If you're really serious about broadband, you can't backhaul multimegabits of traffic from all these users to two big data centers sitting in Virginia. And @Home is distributed so you can't bring down the whole thing at once.
The telcos, including AOL partners, are rapidly deploying digital subscriber line technology. Could DSL overtake cable?
If cable continues a rapid broadband rollout, it will drive the telephone companies into a more aggressive push of DSL. Even if you think cable modems are hooey and you've been so pissed off at your cable company that you would never buy squat from a cable operator, you should love cable - it's what prompts the phone companies to action. Over time, DSL will become more of a competitor.
@Home's rollout has been a long time coming. How many eyeballs can you reach?
By the end of last year, we'd passed 13 million homes. And by the end of 1999, analysts have us north of 20 million homes. We have 60 million total on contract. So today we're about a fifth of the way to being fully deployed in our markets. This is far faster than ISDN - certainly way faster than DSL.
But why has it taken so long?
You can rebuild a big system in one swoop. TCI's problem is that it has a lot of little systems that may not be interconnected or may be under different franchise requirements - that's a harder job.
Where will @Home be in five years?
We'll be offering access to services over all kinds of mediums to all kinds of devices. You'll have residential networks in your house. You'll have wireless networks. You'll have much more integration of information. Your cell phone, your pager, your television set, your PC, your network terminal - it will all work together. You'll tell the system the stuff you care about. The system will do your bidding for you. There will be video talk and voice services over the same conduit.
Wall Street's in love with @Home these days. What's it like to be making so much money?
I wouldn't have spent 10 years as a civil servant at NASA if money was terribly important to me. I know a lot of very successful, very unhappy people. If you have character issues, money gives you more ways to cause trouble for yourself.
That's pretty easy for a guy worth $70 million.
There's a verse in the Bible, in James, that says, "God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble." Nothing like that to balance out Silicon Valley culture.
