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Sunday, January 16, 2000
AOL deal's ripple effect on S. Texas
SBC, AT&T speed up on high-speed access
The America Online-Time Warner merger has raised some hopes locally that South Texas won't stay on the wrong side of the so-called digital divide for long.
"Indirectly it will help South Texas because AOL has a lot of subscribers in South Texas," said Charles Doraine, vice president of investments for Merrill Lynch. "And they're going to want faster access to South Texas because customers are going to want it. Cable is the fastest way."
Doraine is up on this stuff, more so than most. He's a gadgety guy, never without the latest satellite-linked communications device in his pocket. He has a video phone in his office. Last week, he returned a page while in Hawaii to talk about what this merger could mean.
"What you have to think about it is, AT&T will now have competition in this local market. Either through AOL or Time Warner cable, somebody will be able to get us high-speed data access here."
The lack of that access has been a concern hereabouts.
"It will just make us equivalent to the rest of the world," Doraine said. "All we want to be is equivalent to San Antonio or Austin, which now we're not.
"That would lead to us being able to attract other companies that need this sort of broadband digital world to do business here. Not having it here hurts us. Having it here makes us equivalent."
Well, guess what? Now both AT&T Cable Services and SBC are making promises they weren't making before, and both say there's no connection to the AOL-Time Warner merger.
Connection or no connection, we're going to have high-speed connection here sooner than previously announced.
SBC says it'll have its digital subscriber line technology up and running by the end of the month. Last October, the best guess was this summer.
And a local AT&T official last October sounded downright dismissive of the idea of providing Internet and phone service over cable lines any time soon. His assessment of the local market was that folks around here wanted television service, period, from their cable company. Last week, that tune changed audibly, although no timetable was offered.
"We're in the process of upgrading our plant and increasing channel capacity and we can't give you a time, but we're definitely looking at bringing in high-speed Internet access as part of that upgrade," said Scott Sobel, communications director for AT&T Cable in Denver. "We've been looking at what we could do to upgrade that plant anyway. The AOL-Time Warner situation didn't have anything to do with that."
The future is sooner, whether we have AOL to thank or not.
Business Editor Tom Whitehurst Jr. can be reached at 886-3619 or by e-mail at whitehurstt@caller.com
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Corpus Christi Caller Times, a Scripps Howard
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