Boulder Trials No Tech Lab.

Don't expect a chemical reaction when AT&T Broadband throws together 10 Internet Service Providers in a Boulder, Colo., "open access" test this November.

Technologically speaking, the trial will be more about marketing issues, says Milo Medin, SVP/CTO of Excite@Home, the lead test ISP.

"It's interesting, and I think we should do it because it's helpful to understand where the market is going from a wholesale perspective, but in terms of splitting atoms, there's nothing prohibitive to do this," Medin says.

AT&T invited AOL, Dell.net, Denver News, Juno, MSN, RMI.net, WorldNet and Yahoo! to join its primary high-speed broadband ISP, Excite@Home, in sharing a broadband network. The trial, expected to run six months, is to "get 500 live users in a neat community, like Boulder ... and bring us and the ISPs together and learn together," says AT&T Broadband's president/CEO Dan Somers.

It's a noble cause that should answer a few questions, agrees Medin.

"There is no standard way of doing multiple ISPs on a cable system. Nobody does that in production effectively today," he says.

There are questions about the architecture and how ISPs effectively share bandwidth.

"A shared network is complicated," he says. "At least it's complicated if you don't want to be inherently inefficient."

Medin backs cable's hybrid fiber/coax (HFC) architecture but notes, "I don't think we have agreement yet in terms of the system architecture that all the industry is going to use for this."

Excite@Home, he says, pretty much has all its ducks in a row, including headend and consumer premises equipment. That, though, means little when it comes to the Boulder trial.

"We're not putting our production users through the same systems," he points out. "It's only an experiment with a limited set of users. There are no operational procedures to this thing."

There are, he admits, some issues that Excite@Home, as the trial's technology partner, will have to work out.

"The real complexity is in how you troubleshoot, how you provision and how you manage bandwidth," he says. "A lot of those things are going to be simplified or not addressed at all as part of the test. Part of the goal here is finding out what the future customers are going to want, and then we'll take that into account as we build products."

Working with other ISPs, Medin notes, is not an alien concept for Excite@Home.

"We have a network that interconnects all these systems, and we have a very good wholesale business on the commercial side," he says. "We're interested in trying to figure out what it is that ISP customers want because we think we're in a great place to offer them a lot of services."