So Much Information, So Many Bills

In a long-distant time, most people paid just one bill for their telecommunications services -- a check in the mail each month to American Telephone and Telegraph that afforded them the privilege of talking on the phone. Period.

And for all the inadequacies of that scenario -- no choice of service, expensive long-distance calling, no Internet, no cell phones, only a handful of TV channels -- a lot of people still seem to pine for the one-telecom-bill part of the deal.

They shouldn't, not yet. At some point, we will get back there: You'll pay one bill for Internet access, and your phone and TV service will ride on that connection.

Right now, however, none of the various channels available for getting information in and out of your house, wired and wireless, is good enough to do all these jobs by itself. Either it doesn't reach enough homes, it's too slow for some uses or it costs too much. That's one reason, as the charts and stories in this special section show, shopping for telecom services is so confusing.

Wires -- electricity, telephone and cable TV -- start this game with the biggest advantage of all: They're already in place, with no need for new construction. And of those three, electrical wires are the most widely deployed of all. But delivering Internet data, much less voice or even television, over power lines is still in its infancy.

Phone lines are right behind power lines in their reach and, when upgraded to digital-subscriber-line capability, excel at delivering fast Internet access. But they don't provide nearly enough bandwidth for TV service.

Worse yet, many phone lines can't be upgraded to DSL in rural areas and in newer developments.

Cable TV lines offer plenty of bandwidth for video and Internet and can easily carry phone traffic as well when converted into Internet data. Yet most cable companies are still just experimenting with voice over Internet protocol service. They also continue to charge substantially more for TV service than satellite broadcasters.

A fourth type of wire, fiber-optic cable, is now being deployed by Verizon, SBC and a few other phone companies. This provides more than enough speed to transmit voice, video and the Web. But fiber service is available in only a relative handful of neighborhoods, and Verizon has yet provide any details of the TV it will provide with its FiOS fiber-optic service.

Wireless doesn't have that "last-mile problem": You don't need to dig up streets or string wires along poles to get the data the last mile to somebody's front door. But no cell-phone data service offers enough bandwidth to carry TV signals; some are swift enough to replace cable or DSL Internet, but they also cost twice as much as most home broadband accounts.

WiFi wireless networking solves the speed problem of cellular but trades that in for severe distance limits. Other technologies, such as the WiMax standard Intel and others have been pushing, are just getting out of the lab.

Then there's satellite, which is great for TV but lousy for other telecom uses. Essentially, satellite is a garden hose -- it works well in only one direction. While two-way satellite broadband does exist, it's the broadband of last resort, with slow upload speeds and terrible latency-- the time it takes for data to fly roughly 22,000 miles each way to and from geosynchronous orbit. That makes many Internet uses awkward at best.

Until those factors change, it will be between foolish and masochistic to try to get all of your telecom needs -- voice, video and Web -- from any one company. For now, it's cheaper to farm out the work to different companies, depending on who can reach your house. In my case, that means TV via satellite, broadband Internet via DSL and landline phone service (unavoidable with my DSL plan) reduced to a metered-rate plan that includes only 50 outgoing calls a month. (We've yet to exceed that limit.)

This kind of arrangement isn't tidy, and the separate bills do take a little more time to pay. But it yields one reward that justifies the mess: the freedom to walk away from one service that doesn't suit your needs.

All-in-one services sound fantastic as a concept, but until more than one company can provide such a connection to your home, they can't give you that bargaining power.

Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro atrob@twp.com.