With a large part of the $25m budget spent, Deutsche Telekom AG has reportedly abandoned its video-on-demand and interactive television trial, which was to have been Europe’s biggest – without a single home actually going on-line. Saying the technology isn’t working to its satisfaction, Telekom and the Baden-Wurttemberg state government announced they are canceling the pilot, which was to have provided up to 4,000 homes with video-on-demand, banking and shopping services. The pilot had already been scaled down to 2,500 homes, but not one actually made the connection because the technology couldn’t be delivered as ordered. The failure is a big blow to Alcatel SEL AG, which a decade and more ago complained bitterly when it lost the Telekom Bildschirmtext viewdata contract to IBM Corp, only to see IBM screw implementation up mightily: given its chance at last, it has proved unable to deliver. Partners on the deal were Robert Bosch GmbH and Hewlett-Packard Co, whose servers were to have been used in the trial. The problem apparently involved the return channel from the television set-top box: Alcatel delivered a set-top box on October 15, its final deadline, and Telekom officials informed the ministry that it did not work properly. Most of Telekom’s six other trials are still in the planning or development phase.
