From the point of view of the Cable Operator, access is not a complex issue. Cable television has no requirements mandated by legislation like those of basic telephone service, requiring cross subsidies to insure universal access (in telephone service, business users are charged slightly more so that individual home users can be charged on average slightly less). Currently, (according to CableLabs, an research organization run by a cable consortium)
cable television serv[es] 62% of US TV households, almost 55 million homes, who pay $20 billion annually for the service. Of all 93 million US households, 91 million of them (97%) have coaxial cable running at or near their property line ("homes passed" in cable terminology). Almost 95% of cable subscribers have access to 30-54 channels, while 35% of subscribers receive 54 or more channels.From the cable operator point of view, they are already providing an affordable service to most American households. For them NII is an interactive extension of these existing services and will be accessible in the same way and ultimately to the same degree. It should be pointed out that although the cable operators are in this to make a profit, that profit is to be made incrementally through providing services to largest numbers possible. In the words of John Malone (from "Infobahn Warrior" an interview in Wired Magazine 2.07 - registration is required for this site)
Our deployment scheme is, if you're a customer and you want it, you're gonna incrementally finance it to put it in your homeHe goes on to say,
We're hoping that the cost to do everything, the whole megillah, you're looking at maybe 500 bucks a home. If we think it's got a life of five years, then it's a hundred bucks a year. We're talking about, what, seven bucks a month? And you're already paying us three or four bucks a month for the old box, so for this new device it's another three bucks a month.Access to these new services may well be determined by a factor of an additional $7.00 a month, an amount that most current cable subscribers can probably afford.
Another aspect of access for these new technologies, it should be noted, is access to produce and distribute materials as well as consume them. Although the cable industry is interested in providing opportunities for new producers to take advantage of these new media, it is in the context of a broadcasting model, i.e., producers will be able to take advantage of the elaborate equipment available at the compression-uplink facilities, much like today's independent television producers use studios and editing equipment made available by local cable providers for "public access".
Like, we have this compression-uplink facility, which we spent 100 million bucks putting in. We call it an artists' workshop. And we're inviting programmers to come in and test their concepts, and we'll distribute them, see if the public is interested. And if we really like an idea, we'll invest in it, help you distribute it, and we'll provide the whole infrastructure.-John Malone, Wired Magazine
