Entry No.64f

IT Writers Awards

All the details for a high-speed Net at home and work.

Last time you waited for what seemed an eternity for a Web page to load or a phone call knocked out your dial-up connection — did you dream that a super-fast broadband service would solve all your problems? You're not alone.

Australians are finally starting to see some movement on the fast Internet front. Don't just imagine a better user experience — broadband access could bring radical change to how we surf, what we do online and the types of services on offer.

Slow wait for fast access

Australia was recently the subject of bad press when Bill Gates called the take-up of broadband in Australia "disappointing". Gates, speaking at the World Economic Forum conference in Melbourne in early September, was surprised by our limited broadband offerings, given the high levels of online Australians.

Industry analysts like the Yankee Group hesitate to put a figure on the number of broadband users in Australia, but estimate it's around 200,000 (telecoms analyst Paul Budde thinks its closer to 100,000). There are several major reasons behind this fairly limited adoption, not least what many perceive is a lack of low-cost, generally available services. (A comparison by the Yankee Group found that broadband was only slightly less affordable in Australia than the US — and more affordable to install.)

Definitions vary, but broadband generally refers to high-speed transmission (usually 256kbps and above), featuring a permanent connection and multiple channels of data. For most people, the primary tasks they undertake online — e-mail and basic Web surfing — can be completed adequately using a 56Kbps dial-up connection.

This is the crux of the issue: without new applications and content that would require this kind of bandwidth, users don't see the need for broadband services. In the absence of a groundswell of users, service providers are reticent to provide and market services. As a result, development of the kinds of applications that would prompt broadband use stalls. This catch 22 is made worse as service providers, who don't want to promote an area for which they don't have a product, don't really explain the benefits of broadband access.

Without an education process to explain the benefits of broadband, the majority of dial-up customers or those with new Internet accounts don't see why they should fork out two or three times the cost of their current ISP service. This, in turn, deters developers from creating new broadband content and applications.

Many observers point to our telecommunications history and regulatory framework as the culprits. Telstra currently holds the top ISP position in Australia, plus it owns a great deal of the telecommunications infrastructure — particularly the all-important access to the "local loop", or the connections to houses and businesses from the exchanges (vital for services like ADSL which run over the copper wires in the local loop). Add to that Telstra's virtual lack of competitors in the cable modem market until Optus's entry early this year and you have one very dominant player, indeed. Additionally, neither Telstra nor Optus is compelled to provide third-party access to their hybrid fibre coaxial networks (although the ACCC has decreed that Telstra and Foxtel must provide access to their cable networks to other pay TV operators).

Increasing competition

This situation may soon be about to change. Regulatory watchdog the ACCC declared the local loop — the copper wires that transmit regular phone calls — in July last year. This meant that Telstra was forced to give access to its infrastructure to other service providers in August 1999. One year later, Telstra announced the pricing of its wholesale ADSL and immediately faced the ire of the ACCC over its pricing scheme.

At press time, Telstra and the ACCC were still haggling over the amount Telstra should charge for its wholesale ADSL service. The ACCC estimates that it should cost Telstra between $21 (in the CBD) and $50 (in rural and remote areas) per line per month, compared to Telstra's figures of $38 to $89. The ACCC's concern — and that of other service providers — is that Telstra's pricing effectively sets the baseline for the rest of the industry. Service providers are then forced to either offer services with the slimmest of profit margins or price them at around the same level as Telstra's.

Colin Goodwin, manager of strategic business development at VivaNet, a Net infrastructure wholesaler, says Telstra's stance on ADSL has caused much frustration. Besides the cost of wholesale ADSL product, Goodwin says, Telstra has also set a high price on access to its copper network. This means it's just as expensive to build an ADSL service on Telstra's copper as to buy the wholesale product from the telco. At the same time, Goodwin says, Telstra is signing up customers on 18-month contracts.

"It's very important that the regulator deals with both issues in their own right," he said. "Just dealing with the high price of access to copper will not help the smaller ISPs who can't afford to build out a network on Telstra's copper." 

"VivaNet would love to provide a consumer ADSL [service]," Goodwin said. "But the wholesale price from Telstra is just too high." VivaNet is instead focusing on services for businesses like VPNs (Virtual Private Networks).

However, Telstra is not the only wholesale ADSL provider in town. While we were preparing this story, RequestDSL was busy putting together its pricing and services packages, and Optus subsidiary XYZed has also launched a wholesale product. Lorenzo Modesto, director of business development at Pacific Internet, says his company has had its ADSL product ready for some months but has has been stymied by Telstra's activities. "We've only recently been able to trust Telstra enough to start sending orders through," he said. Modesto also warns that the ISP market could see a shakeout as a result of ADSL. "Telstra's going to mop up a whole lot of the market." Pacific Internet is also readying a wholesale product that will be aimed at helping smaller ISPs offer ADSL — and weather these changes.

Telstra's Denis Mullane, ADSL project director, claims Telstra's ADSL prices sat at the cheaper end of services offered by the larger ADSL providers in the USA, Asia, the UK and New Zealand. "Recent price comparisons with global companies showed that many can exclude ISP costs, installation, activation and GST from their prices. Importantly, Telstra pricing includes all these elements as part of the total cost," he said.

On the ISP side, Stuart Marburg, managing director at Netspace, says his company plans to use multiple ADSL wholesalers to underpin its service, due to launch around December. As well as increasing coverage of the service, this will mean the ISP can offer various service quality levels for different products to increase consumer choice. iPrimus, iiNet, and Pacific Internet have already announced ADSL consumer and business products.

Another kind of digital divide: rural vs. urban

This brings us to the next big issue: availability. ADSL and cable modems may sound great, but unless you live close to a city on the east coast your choices narrow dramatically (ADSL, for example, works within just 3.5km of an ADSL-outfitted exchange). Even for city-dwellers, coverage can be patchy, and services like Optus's cable modem may not connect to multiple properties like units and apartments. Similarly, cable could run past your house but not be provisioned for Internet access.

The introduction of satellite and wireless services is good news for many Australians who live in regional and rural areas. In March, European ISP Chello (which is in the process of merging with Excite@Home) launched an MMDS (Multichannel Multipoint Distribution Service) wireless service that uses dial-up for upsteam, satellite for downstream, specifically targeted at bush and regional users. Austar looks after the installation and the satellite and wireless infrastructure.

While Access 1's satellite services doesn't have rural POPs (you can use the service outside the POPs but you pay STD charges to dial up), a number of regional areas are online. Some examples are Wollongong and Maitland in NSW and Geelong in Victoria, plus Perth, Adelaide and Canberra. The Access 1 satellite is not two-way (you use a 56Kbps dial-up modem to connect to Access 1, and Access 1 delivers the content you request from the Net via satellite).

There are also moves to compete with the big players at the local level that could help potential consumers outside the Sydney/Brisbane/ Melbourne axis. In Canberra, for example, TransAct is in the process of building a cable network that will allow transmission of multiple services, including Internet access and pay TV. TransAct's is an open network — which means it plans to open it up for other content providers. Services could include telemedicine or distance learning, or be targeted at a local community. Another smaller player, Neighborhood Cable, operates services in Ballarat, Mildura, Bendigo in Victoria and Albury/Wodonga on the NSW/Victorian border.

Telstra, meanwhile, has signalled a new stance in the cable modem market. In October the telco said it had signed up Cisco to help it upgrade users to the open DOCSIS (Data over Cable Service Interface Specification) standard. The project, said to be valued at $100 million, will enable Telstra to provide cable services to 500,000 customers in five years, Cisco said. Telstra will also configure its cable network in Adelaide and Perth for Net access next year. According to a statement issued on the deal, Telstra plans to roll out new cable modem services to 1000 new subscribers per week. DOCSIS is an Internet Protocol-based standard used around the world for the transmission of data over hybrid fibre coaxial cable networks.

Says Simon Wright, who runs broadband news site Whirlpool.net.au, the move to DOCSIS will be of great benefit to the spread of broadband in Australia. "Any move to conform with a standard should be applauded," he said. Besides being able to buy modems from more vendors, Wright says, customers will also have more opportunity to switch between cable vendors if they have a standard modem.

Optus's cable business has also been in the news recently. As well as reportedly being up for sale (the UK paper The Independent reported in October that British media group Grenada had set its sights on the cable business — with a $3 billion price tag mooted), Optus@Home's attempts to limit users' downloads has been widely attacked. As the performance of cable networks can decrease when more and more users are connected, cable providers find it necessary to limit what they deem "excessive use" — but this isn't the point under contention.

Optus's Acceptable Use Policy states that, "You will be deemed to represent an unusually large burden on the Optus@Home Network if the bandwidth you utilise via the Services (your 'Usage') exceeds ten times the Average Customer Usage during any Usage Period." Users complain that it's hard to keep track of a constantly changing target — plus, Optus initially marketed its product as free of download limits and used the term "unlimited". Optus says users must monitor their usage to see if they are exceeding the average, for the good of all users. The issue is sure to continue to cause heated debate.

Optus has already been questioned by the ACCC on its use of the word "unlimited". In September, the ACCC pulled Optus up when it attempted to restrict the number of calls consumers made under "unlimited" local call deals. "This move should send two very clear messages to all players in the telecommunications industry and to businesses generally," ACCC Chairman, Allan Fels, said at the time.

"First, terms such as 'unlimited' cannot usually be qualified and businesses should be extremely cautious in placing limitations on what consumers would ordinarily see as unrestricted product offerings," he said. "Second, if businesses try to limit expressions such as 'free', 'unlimited' or 'all you can use' then these exclusions must be clearly stated at the time they are made".

Where to now?

What does a fast Internet connection mean? On the following pages, we'll take a look at how broadband can change the way you use the Net as well as how it improves your time online. Next month, PC World's broadband special will continue with detailed coverage of the technology to help you choose the right access for your needs.

Changing how we live

You could get a broadband service, be it ADSL, satellite, cable or wireless — but why would you want to? For home users who currently use the Net in small amounts for e-mail and a little Web surfing, the jump to broadband may seem unnecessary. But there are many compelling reasons why you could benefit from broadband, now as well as in the future.

Improving your Net experience

If you have a basic dial-up connection now, you won't know what has hit you once you try broadband. VivaNet's Colin Goodwin says for many users who have experienced broadband, a shift back is like a step back from a Pentium III-powered PC to a 286.

The speeds offered by broadband will revolutionise your experience. Wireless ISP Chello quotes figures from Cable Labs that compare the download times for a 500KB image. For a 28.8Kbps modem, you're looking at 6-8 minutes; for 64Kbps ISDN, this time falls to 1-1.5 minutes. Compare this to 1 second for a 10Mbps cable modem connection, and you can see the picture.

In another example, Neighborhood Cable claims it takes 53 seconds to download a 20MB file using their network compared to 1.8 minutes over DSL and 50 minutes using a 56Kbps analog modem. Even factoring the shared nature of ADSL and cable modems (where the number of users can affect performance) you're still looking at a major boost over dial-up.

More than just the practical benefits of a faster connection, broadband can also change the way you approach using the Internet. With a dial-up connection you may consider it a hassle to log on frequently to look up small items online — for example, using Yellow Pages to find a phone number. If, instead, you have an always-on, fast connection, these tasks can be completed quickly, with little fuss. This may seem a trivial example, but it demonstrates a change to a more casual approach to the Net. 

ISP Chello con-ducted a survey in January and February this year in a bid to discover how broadband changes the behaviour of users online. The survey compared the attitudes of 1500 Chello broadband customers with 2000 dial-up users. Those with broadband clocked twice the time online per household compared to dial-up (72 hours versus 36), as well as twice the number of times accessing the Internet (four times a day compared to two for dial-up). Broadband services were also more likely to be used by more members of households — 2.5 users compared to 1.8 for dial-up. Of broadband users, 94 per cent used the Internet every day compared to 77 per cent for dial-up.

Broadband users, according to the survey, were more likely to access news and public services online than those with dial-up accounts. Those with broadband more often purchased goods online — especially software, as you would expect given the much faster download times. The only goods dial-up users were more likely to buy were financial services.

Ironically — given that broadband services are often touted as being more expensive — there's also the issue of price. According to VivaNet's Goodwin, once you factor in the cost of local calls every time you dial up, your 56Kbps account may not seem that cheap after all — especially if you plan to outlay the cost of a second phone line. With an ADSL or cable modem connection, for example, you can surf the Web without tying up your phone line — plus, the connection can be shared amongst other PCs in your home. ADSL, cable modem, satellite and wireless services do generally cost more to set up, but in most cases the necessary modems are included.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of fast Internet access at home is crystal-ball gazing: looking at the kinds of services we will be able to access in the future. Cisco recently opened its iHome — a house it developed with Lend Lease to showcase how an Internet-enabled house could work. According to Kip Cole, marketing director at Cisco, the reason behind limited take-up of broadband is that "nobody knows how it will affect the way we live".

If your house and its contents were connected to the Net you could control them from anywhere. You could set your air conditioning just before you left work, for example, so that when you arrived home it would be just the right temperature. For some time, appliance developers have had this development in mind.

Many white goods already carry CPUs — if they had modems or were connected to PCs, what's to stop monitoring of appliances over the Net? In this case, you could have a service contract with a white goods company that could monitor your fridge or washing machine and repair any problems before a major breakdown — either remotely, if possible, or by sending a technician.

South Korea's LG Electronics had already launched an Internet-enabled refrigerator when it unveiled an Internet-ready washing machine in October. According to a statement from the company, the LG Turbo Drum washing machine can connect to the Internet to download new programs to match new fabrics.

Unlike the refrigerator, the washing machine can't directly go online. With no built-in modem, the machine must be connected to a PC in order to hook up to the Internet and download new software. LG is also currently developing a home network modem for the machine, which, when fitted, will enable users to monitor and program their machine remotely from anywhere on the network.

The machine is the result of a three-year development project that involved 30 engineers and cost 4 billion won ($US3.5 million). The next project likely to be released in the range is an Internet microwave oven that can go online and download recipes, said LG. The company expects it to be unveiled within the next year.

Whirlpool and mobile phone vendor Nokia, meanwhile, have signed a global agreement to work together to develop Internet-enabled, networked home products — focused on wireless connectivity. In January, Whirlpool signed similar agreements with Cisco and Sun Microsystems. In May, as part of its Integrated Home Solutions initiative, Whirlpool also joined the Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) Forum, a Microsoft-backed initiative for enabling connectivity between PCs and a broad range of other devices.

While Cisco's Cole thinks that the ability to control appliances via the Internet will attract the most attention, it will be the community services delivered over broadband that will have the most impact on our lives.

With fast Internet access, applications like telemedicine and video conferencing could move to more widespread use. Doctors are already debating how much they should be allowed to charge for an e-mail consultation — who's to say the next step isn't a video conference with your local GP?

Students will also be able to work with tutors online after school (saving Mum's taxi) and local councils can foster closer ties with communities by providing information online. Again, with fast access, checking information like the date of the next council rubbish pick-up could be faster than a phone call.

Cole does warn that there are reliability issues to work out before this world can become reality. One of the purposes of the iHome development is to see how a number of applications can work in situ. After all, "you don't want a Windows blue screen to lock you out or turn out all the lights," Cole said.

The connected neighbourhood

In August this year, technology magazine Wired reported on the city of LaGrange in the US state of Georgia. LaGrange, with a population of 27,000, had won the title of "Intelligent City of the Year" from the World Teleport Association (WTA) — beating out cities like New York, London and Toronto. The crux of the award, according to the WTA, is not just having access to technology, but harnessing it.

David Aden, an economist studying the effects of Internet infrastructure on cities, told Wired he believed LaGrange is a deserving winner. "The city could have died when its textile industry faded," he said. "But instead they built fibre optic networks, offered low-cost broadband services to local businesses and the town's citizens. Too many small towns simply build an industrial park and offer relocation assistance to lure companies in. They understood that big bandwidth wins business for small cities."

LaGrange achieved the title by building an extensive hybrid fibre coax network to give residents and businesses access to high-speed connectivity. Citizens have free cable modems for fast Internet access. For the city, broadband represents a chance to transform itself from a declining manufacturing town to one with the infrastructure and wired, technology-literate community to attract new business.

Locally, developments like TransAct's in Canberra represent moves at a community level. TransAct argues that Canberra is ideal for an advanced, full-service network. "Public administration, lobbying, research and development, education and information technology are some of the city's key industries," the company explains on its Web site. "Measures such as PC ownership and Internet access are typically 50 per cent higher than in other cities."

Open networks like TransAct's also allow service providers to trial and demonstrate new community-oriented services. Some examples could be neighbourhood intranets — sites that are closed to a community and feature information targeted at that group. Families in these neighbourhoods can check the intranet for details on the local soccer league, specials offered by shops in the area or notices from schools. When everyone has a fast, easy connection, accessing this kind of information could be just as easy as checking the local newspaper. Of course, people or groups will still need to take responsibility for managing and updating this information.

Taken together, the Internet-enabled home and broadband- connected community open other possibilities. One could be a kind of electronic neighbourhood watch — where neighbours are alerted if a house is broken into by that home's Internet-enabled security system.

Broadband-enabled communities can either be created in existing suburbs and cities such as Canberra, or in brand new developments. Lend Lease's involvement in the iHome indicates this is certainly on the agenda. "This is a growth market and we want to be involved from the ground up," Ron Cutler, project director at Lend Lease, says.

A lot of these ideas are speculations by industry watchers, extrapolating what is possible by noting the changes broadband connection can bring. What they do show is that there will be lots of great ways to use up all that bandwidth! 

Changing how we work 

roadband is not just of benefit at home. There are advances to be had at work, especially in the SME sector and for teleworking.

Much of the discussion surrounding the launch of new services like ADSL and cable modems concerns the consumer market, but for many of the ISPs looking to offer these products, it's the SME market that holds the greatest opportunities.

Stuart Marburg, managing director at ISP Netspace, says that convincing consumers of the benefits can be "a hard slog", but it's an easy sell for SMEs.

"We see the first groups to be interested in broadband are technologists and people that love using the Internet, game players and offices," he says. "ADSL can give offices a method of 24x7 Internet access that is reliable and cheap compared to ISDN."

VivaNet's Colin Goodwin agrees. VivaNet currently has an ADSL offering for other ISPs that targets SMEs looking to use virtual private networks (VPNs). Other than ADSL, Goodwin says, most SMEs would need to use ISDN — an expensive proposition for many smaller companies. While ADSL is not a point-to-point data pipe like ISDN (Internet access using ADSL is a one-to-many transmission method rather than end-to-end connectivity), it does offer a reliable alternative with good throughput, he said. "Once you explain that what they are contracting for is a service at a certain quality at a good price, they stop focusing on the [data rate]."

"The whole model of VPNs is so much more flexible," Goodwin says. "It's teaching people that they don't need to design every link." The result for SMEs is more services at a reasonable cost. By contracting a VPN (a private network within the Internet) from an ISP, for example, you can hand over a lot of the tasks like building and managing firewalls.

For Netspace, a lot of its recent growth has come from business customers. Marburg says this is a combination of a realisation that online is the way to go and the upgrades many companies did to face Y2K. Besides upgrades to PCs, The Small Business report compiled by the Yellow Pages and the National Office for the Information Economy (NOIE) released in May this year found that around 40 per cent of medium-sized businesses expected to upgrade or purchase new telecommunications lines this year. A "significant proportion" of small businesses, meanwhile, also said they intended upgrading their lines — most for the first time. With broadband products at the ready, ISPs will be aggressively targeting this group.

Primus and Telstra already have ADSL products targeted at businesses, and newer entrants like Netspace and VivaNet's ISP customers will be going after the same market segment. Netspace's approach, according to Marburg, will be to offer SMEs a virtual IT department, including services like managing mail servers and off-site storage. Fast connections help to make online storage a viable option since backing up large amounts of data over a dial-up connection can be a trial.

Phil Sykes from RequestDSL says his company will focus on working with ISPs to show SMEs how easy it can be to migrate to broadband (for example, maintaining naming conventions), and cost comparisons with ISDN, rather than the issue of faster access.

Online all the time

With fast, permanent connections, many SMEs will be able to take fuller advantage of e-commerce — either selling their own products or gaining cost savings by buying products online. Employees who may have had restricted access to the Net will be able to increase their use of mail and the Net for research and respond faster to enquiries that are e-mailed or submitted online. Of course, this may see SMEs face some of the human resources issues with which larger companies have been grappling — such as policies for employees' online activities. Several business-to-business exchanges have already set up shop online to target purchases over the Net.

The next step, VivaNet's Goodwin says, will be transmitting voice calls. "We don't have this yet, but I see that as an attractive proposition: being able to run all your office communications — voice and data — over the one reliable line."

This is also an option for consumers and those working at home. "There's the potential to get five lines into a house," Sykes says. With this kind of capability, ADSL will look more cost competitive.

But ADSL and cable modems are not the only developments of interest for SMEs. Access 1, for example, has a satellite product for smaller businesses it calls an "ISDN killer". For around $490 per month you can have unlimited access, download speeds of up to 400Kbps and a download limit of 3000MB per month. Installation is more expensive than ADSL and cable modems, but for companies that are not covered by those technologies it could be an option to investigate.

Companies moving to the Net for the first time, or moving to ADSL or cable modems, however, will need to seriously consider the security implications. An always-on connection with a static IP address can leave you open to a greater number of attacks than intermittent dial-up use. With a dial-up account, your ISP assigns a different IP address for each session — a dynamic IP address. A static IP address, on the other hand, never changes, which can make it easier for hackers to single you out for attack.

This issue can usually be resolved by installing a good firewall (PC World reviewed several personal firewalls in the October issue, page 72) and implementing security practices like keeping up to date with software patches.

With broadband connectivity in place, or a VPN, companies can also seriously consider moves to teleworking. With reliable, fast links for data access and phone lines, employees could more easily work from home. In addition to e-mail and access to the corporate network, broadband also means smoother, less jerky video conferencing — allowing staff to hold meetings wherever they are.

Developments in Voice over IP and voice over DSL could also see companies extend their corporate phone systems to teleworkers. You could answer your extension just like you would in the head office. With more and more people working longer hours, the lifestyle benefits of working from home and avoiding wasting time commuting are becoming of increasing interest.

Tony Nash, managing director at Best People, an SME in the recruitment sector, believes a big issue for all companies next year will be understanding how broadband will change their businesses. "Managers need to ask: what is going to happen to this business?"

"In our industry, the possibilities are huge," he said. "We could interview a candidate in the office and store it so clients can access it over broadband connections and see if that person is right for them, for instance." Nash's comments raise an important issue: broadband can not only help the way you run your own operations, it can also open new ways of improving and growing your business. Your customers may soon have bandwidth to spare, so it pays to take the short breathing space now to think about this opportunity.

The benefits to our working lives probably don't have the cool factor of the entertainment- and Internet-enabled homes, but many of the things discussed here are not just visions — they're available now or will be in the short term.

Now for the fun part

Even before the Internet, broadband has been positioned as the means to increase consumers' entertainment options. DSL, for example, was originally developed to compete with cable networks in delivering TV and video. It's many years since these developments — and the Internet has stolen the show in the meantime — but it's only a matter of time before entrepreneurs see the opportunities in targeting entertainment services at the broadband-enabled.

Napster and Scour have set off major shock waves in the music and film industries and many media companies are struggling to create digital strategies. While Napster's fate seems uncertain, it is clear that file sharing will not be going away. The popularity of Napster alone makes this a certainty. Music and film companies are identifying a way to let this happen, yet protect their (and the artists') copyrights and still make money.

"All the business models are changing," says local Cisco MD, Terry Walsh, but content, he believes, will be the main revenue source in the age of broadband. "Movie companies may pay telcos a fee to let you download a movie instead of going to the video store," he said. "Or telcos may give away voice calls in bundles with data."

Companies around the world that own content are also in the process of considering how they can work with what they have and repackage it for broadband consumption. One example provided by Milos Medin, chief technical officer at Excite@Home, is giving potential film-goers a single place to check movie screening times at their local cinema, integrated with reviews and trailers. Sure, you could just check the newspaper, but the ability to watch a preview could help you choose between a dud and a classic. A US company called Interactive Video Technologies recently showcased its "sync-it" technology at a Digital Hollywood conference in the US. Sync-it can be used to integrate streaming video content on a Web site with associated text.

Real Networks announced in September that it had signed up over 50 media companies and Web broadcasters to use its RealVideo8 to deliver streaming media. Media in RealVideo8 can reach near-VHS quality over a broadband connection, if said.

Online radio station BigFatRadio may have closed its doors in October, but there is still major interest in listening to radio on the Internet. Industry observers, however, suggest that would-be Net radio stations should look to offer new formats. In fact, for many people, listening to radio on the Internet means the chance to hear stations from around the world. Of course, an always-on con-nection could make Internet radio a possible replacement for your usual radio station. Companies like Kerbango and AudioRamp are certainly hoping that high-speed connections will make for a healthy Internet radio market. Kerbango, acquired by 3Com in June, has not set a date for the release of its Internet radio product (above), but it's expected to retail for around $US300.

There are also products on the way that will help you channel and manage content to your current home enter-tainment setup. One example is the ZapStation universal media player. "The ZapStation plugs into existing TVs, stereos and the Internet, allowing consumers to download, stream, store, and manage access to video and music files from the Web," said president Eric Hartz. The ZapStation sports a 30GB hard drive and you connect to the Net using DSL or cable. The product is slated to be available by Christmas in the US and is priced at $US599.

TV may also be in for an Internet makeover. Consumers have only so much leisure time and TV companies are moving to make sure they don't lose their share. There is WebTV (where you use your TV to access the Web), but the bone of contention in Australia is interactive TV (ITV).

ICE Interactive, a middleware supplier to ITV players, with regional broadcaster WIN has a trial underway in Orange, NSW, that uses a set-top box to provide a TV portal. Users can choose from a range of free-to-air and subscription broadcast services, as well as program guides, Web surfing and e-mail. Austar also has an ITV trial running in rural Australia using Satellite.

The idea behind ITV is that viewers can interact with what they see on TV (request a brochure after seeing a car ad, for example, from Toyota). There are still issues to be resolved surrounding whether this interaction is limited to pre-programmed responses stored in the set-top box or whether there's a "back-channel" for real-time interaction of the data. This medium could also lead to a kind of TV on-demand — where you program your own schedule.

In terms of gaming, many enthusiasts are already aware of the advantages of broadband. Lowered network latency means you can play against other gamers in another city or country. Plus, with greater bandwidth, downloading games and demos is no longer a painful process. Gamers, however, may need to review their options carefully. Broadband options like satellite may not be best, given the time it takes to send data via the satellite and the disparity in forward and return paths.

Like the discussion on how broadband can change the way you use the Internet at home, interesting applications are yet to be dreamed up. Only time will tell if the media companies that own much of mainstream, Western content will act to take advantage — or whether start-ups will continue to shake up the entertainment industry.

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