Outside, a chilly rain is peltingSilicon Valley on a miserablegray afternoon. Inside, com-

fortably ensconced in a fake living roomat Home—or, technically, @Home—mycolleague Wayt Gibbs and I are baskingin the glow of a 33-inch, $5,000 Mit-subishi monitor. Officially, I have cometo interview Milo Medin, @Home’s vicepresident of networking and Silicon Val-ley’s genius of the moment. Unofficially,we’ve both come to see whether one ofthe first Internet services delivered bytelevision cable, rather than by telephoneline, is all it’s cracked up to be.

@Home was founded on an alluringpremise. Cable television systems arebroadband: they convey signals occupy-ing a wide piece of the radio-frequencyspectrum. They are in effect “fat pipes”that can carry data at up to 10 millionbits per second. This capability—with afair amount of supporting hardware—

could make them a much better medi-um for connecting to the Internet thanthe narrowband telephone network,which by comparison is a bunch of sodastraws, with data poking along at sev-eral thousand, or at most tens of thou-sands, of bits per second.

Although @Home is only two yearsold, its bold plan has already fired theimagination of a number of technologywriters, who have portrayed the com-pany’s quest in David and Goliath terms.Besides @Home, David consists of sev-eral relative upstarts in the Internet bus-iness, such as Netscape Communica-tions Corporation and the three cabletelevision operators that own much of@Home: Tele-Communications, Inc.(TCI), Comcast Corporation and CoxCommunications, Inc. Goliath consistsof (what else?) Microsoft Corporationand the regional telephone companies,who argue that cable’s apparent over-whelming speed advantage will witherif many users flock to cable-Internet sys-tems, gobbling up their fat bandwidth.

Moreover, the telephone people in-sist, several advanced telecommunica-tions technologies, successors to the in-tegrated-services digital network (ISDN),will narrow the gap in the near future.At present, ISDN service offers typically56,000 bits per second at a cost of about

$25 a month; Internet service adds an-other $20 or so a month. (A commer-cial T1 line can transmit data at 1.544million bits per second but, with corpo-rate Internet access, costs in the neigh-borhood of $2,500 per month.)

Whether cable-Internet systems canavoid potentially fatal growing painswill largely be determined by the inge-nuity of Medin (pronounced meh-DEEN), a 33-year-old communicationsengineer. Regardless of whether Goliathkeels over, Medin may wind up influenc-ing the Internet as much as anyone elsein the near future. It would be another ina string of achievements for the man

that technology writer George Gildercalled a “hard-core Unix Christian lib-ertarian netbender from outer space.”

Medin’s office is a study in Silicon Val-ley spartan. On his desk is a Sun Sparc-station 20 and towering heaps of paper.There’s a small round table, a tall butempty bookcase and 10 black mugs, allof them containing black coffee in vari-ous amounts and vintages. On the tableis a partly disassembled cable modem.Exuding technical know-how in a stripedoxford shirt, blue jeans, white leathersneakers and a pager, Medin holds forthon @Home’s system. Words tumble outat a remarkable rate, as his eyebrows

fly up and down, his eyes widen and al-most seem to bug out, and his arms andhands jab and wave.

“He can talk about technology for awhole evening and never tire of it,”warns Jay A. Rolls, director of multime-dia technology for Cox. What sets himapart, Rolls adds, is “an ability to com-municate” and “vision. He can look ata technology and see right away wherehe can take it.”

Medin learned early what it was liketo face a difficult situation. When hewas five years old, his father, a Serbianimmigrant who farmed eight hectaresof grapes in Fresno, Calif., died of a

heart attack. No one else in the family—

Milo, his four-year-old sister, Mary Ann,and his mother, Stella—spoke English.His mother could not drive a car andknew nothing about farming or financ-es. “When I went to kindergarten, Ididn’t understand a word the teacherwas saying,” Medin recalls. “My sister,my mom and I went through my kin-dergarten workbooks together, learningabout [English] words.” His mothersubsequently not only learned how torun the farm but increased its output.

Medin read voraciously, especiallyabout science. An interest in technologyblossomed in high school, when his

News and Analysis Scientific American January 1997 33

PROFILE: MILO MEDIN

Do Try This @Home

CABLE GUY MILO MEDINis delivering the Internet to homes via television cable.

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Copyright 1996 Scientific American, Inc.Copyright 1996 Scientific American, Inc.

mother bought him an Apple II com-puter and a 300-bits-per-second mo-dem. Class valedictorian, he went on tothe University of California at Berkeleyand loved it. At the height of the nucle-ar freeze movement of the early 1980s,an activist approached him and ex-claimed, “Do you know that Reaganwants to spend a trillion dollars on adefense buildup?” Medin’s incredulousresponse was, “Is that all?” The man’sjaw dropped.

But if Berkeley’s leftists found Medinhard to believe, so, too, did the FederalBureau of Investigation. While at Berke-ley, Medin worked part-time at Law-rence Livermore National Laboratorywriting software that was used to de-sign solid-state lasers and to model nu-clear weapons effects. The job required asecurity clearance and therefore a back-ground check by the FBI. Medin’s moreliberal friends seemed to sailthrough the process, but ap-parently the bureau hadtrouble accepting the exis-tence, in the Berkeley stu-dent body, of a right-wingconservative with strong re-ligious beliefs. “Is this guy aplant? Is he a nut?” is howMedin guesses their reac-tion. While Medin was be-ing investigated, a man ap-proached him and tried tosell him a white powder. If itwas a test, Medin passed: heimmediately had the manarrested by the campus po-lice. He got his clearance notlong after.

After college, Medin wentto work at the National Aeronauticsand Space Administration Ames Re-search Center, where he found a hodge-podge of proprietary data networks.His view was that the agency shouldabandon such networks in favor of anopen one that was compatible with anykind of computer. In those days, thatmeant switching to a brand-new De-fense Department creation known asthe Transmission Control Protocol/In-ternetworking Protocol—the founda-tion of today’s Internet. Medin becamea tireless and well-informed evangelistfor TCP/IP, and the good times rolled.“Being a nonconformist in the govern-ment can be a lot of fun,” he says, “be-cause you’re on a crusade against in-competence.”

A number of achievements and an-ecdotes burnished the Medin mystique.

In 1988 he shut down Scandinavian In-ternet connectivity (which ran throughAmes at the time) because an adminis-trator in Finland refused to rein in ahacker who had invaded Medin’s net-work. Such stories had made a minorcelebrity of Medin when, in 1995, Klei-ner Perkins Caufield & Byers, one of theValley’s top venture capital firms, camecalling. Medin ignored them. “I thoughtit was a law firm,” he explains. K-P part-ner John Doerr persisted and finally ar-ranged a breakfast meeting with Medin,at which Doerr and others made a pitchfor @Home and asked Medin to be itstechnical chief. Medin politely declinedthe offer, then went on to tell them whytheir plan wouldn’t work. “It’s a niceidea, but it’s overly simplistic,” was thegist of what he said. “The expression ontheir faces was like I ran over their pup-py,” he recalls.

It took Doerr two months, but at lasthe landed Medin, whose first order ofbusinesss was addressing the flaws in@Home’s technical plan. Although hewas a data-networking legend, he onlybegan learning about cable televisionwhile he was being recruited for@Home. (He did not even have cable inhis own home.) “You mean you haveall this fiber?” he remembers thinking.“And you don’t digitize, you AM mod-ulate? Very weird.”

The main problem with @Home’soriginal scheme was that it did not dealwith bottlenecks throughout the Inter-net that would render pointless @Home’sfat pipes to the home. The only way toensure high data rates all the way fromWorld Wide Web site to viewer, Medinconcluded, was to build a private, high-speed backbone network and, most im-

portant, store frequently accessed pagescloser to viewers in large caches spreadaround the country.

With the backbone and caching sys-tem largely in place, TCI began offering@Home’s service for $35 a month to itsCalifornia customers in Sunnyvale andFremont last September. At press time,Cox, TCI and Comcast were also aboutto introduce the service to subscribersin Baltimore, Hartford, Orange County,California, and Arlington Heights, Ill.

“We want to show people how broad-band is different,” Medin says. Whileaccessing @Home’s own content throughits Web browser, screens refresh instant-ly. The displayed pages are also huge,generated from as many as 50 timesmore bits as conventional pages. Onone side of the screen, reports on traffic,weather, stocks or other subjects are up-dated at intervals as short as two min-

utes. In the center of thescreen, the main image seemsalmost frenetically alive, withsmart design, flashing graph-ics and dollops here and thereof audio and video. The over-all experience compares toconventional Internet in theway water skiing comparesto the backstroke.

But how about when thecontent isn’t @Home’s? Dur-ing a break in the demonstra-tion, Gibbs, my co-worker,grabs the keyboard and callsup a few sites. Some snap upinstantly; others, particularlyApple Computer’s site, areslower (Apple’s site, however,is a notorious underperform-

er). An informal survey of seven @Homecustomers by the San Francisco Exam-iner last October found that all werehappy with the service.

Of course, speed alone won’t guaran-tee @Home’s success, not with other ca-ble mavens readying high-speed servic-es of their own. Excalibur, a joint ven-ture of Time-Warner Cable and Time,Inc., is offering its broadband Roadrun-ner service in Akron and Canton, Ohio,and in Binghamton, N.Y. Like thepesky Finnish hacker, though, the com-petition will find Medin a formidableadversary. What else would you expectof a man who peppers conversationswith allusions to nuclear weapons andwhose war cry, dating to his NASA

Ames days, is: “If you are willing to betyour job on your beliefs, you can go along way.” —Glenn Zorpette

News and Analysis36 Scientific American January 1997

@HOME WEB PAGEis a gate into information thickets.

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Copyright 1996 Scientific American, Inc.Copyright 1996 Scientific American, Inc.