MediaOne launching new L.A. fiber-optic network.

A new high-capacity fiber-optic service is being launched in Los Angeles this week by cable television company MediaOne.

The service, open to all L.A. businesses but primarily aimed at local entertainment and multimedia companies, will be hooked up to MediaOne's nationwide fiber-optic trunk line. Over time, similar networks will be built in other U.S. cities and tied into that trunk.

MediaOne, a unit of U.S. West Media Group, decided to introduce the service in Los Angeles due to the area's exploding demand for state-of-the-art fiber optics.

"Los Angeles has more new media and entertainment people than anywhere else," said Scott Tolleson, general manager of MediaOne Connect, a new El Segundo-based division created to handle the network. "It has the biggest demand of any city we serve in the U.S. for transmission of data between sites."

The new network is the first one available to any business operating in most areas of Los Angeles County. (Phone company fiber networks are open only to those L.A.-area businesses that the phone companies agree to hook up, not to all businesses that request such service.)

The network will initially include the entire L.A. basin west of the Long Beach (710) Freeway and the San Fernando Valley east of the San Diego (405) Freeway, except Burbank and Glendale. Those two entertainment-dominated cities will be added to the network by the end of March.

MediaOne's business-oriented fiber network is part of a five-year, $250 million regionwide service upgrade that began in 1995. Nationwide, Tollenson said, MediaOne is spending $2.8 billion on service upgrades, with much of that going toward a fiber-optic superhighway.

MediaOne's network has the capacity to transmit more than 270 megabytes of information instantaneously, without data compression. This very broad bandwidth is an essential feature for multimedia, entertainment and post-production companies that need to transmit video clips from remote sites for editing.

(By comparison, most phone company fiber networks offer capacities ranging from five to 50 megabytes, depending on the type of fiber line.)

"We are targeting the production side of the entertainment business, where a whole bunch of companies come together on a single project and need to transmit the clips from site to site," Tolleson said.

The MediaOne Connect fiber service also has applications for the banking and medical industries, which also need high-capacity lines to transmit complex fields of data and images, he said.

But the service is open to any business located within the service area. It will cost between $1,000 and $100,000 a month, depending on the type of service requested, the capacity needed and the frequency of use.

"There's a whole new world of Internet commerce opening up that will also need to use fiber. And L.A. is one of the centers of that commerce," Tolleson said.

Right now, the Internet is adequate for most e-commerce uses, he said. However, as companies begin to transmit more complex data and video images - such as Internet shopping catalogs - they will find themselves increasingly hindered by the relatively slow speed and low capacity of conventional phone lines.

Tolleson said it will typically take two to six weeks for a business to get hooked up to the fiber network. For each hookup, MediaOne will send out its own construction and equipment crews.

The new MediaOne service is different from the cable-modem broadband service the company launched in late October in Culver City. That was primarily aimed at consumers and has a capacity of 1.5 megabytes.