5 Paths to the highway
Before we can enjoy the benefits of the applications and appliances described in the preceding chapter, the information highway has to exist. It doesn’t yet. This may surprise some people, who hear everything from a long‑distance telephone network to the Internet described as “the information superhighway.” The truth is that the full highway is unlikely to be available in homes for at least a decade.
Personal computers, multi‑media CD‑ROM software, high‑capacity cable television networks, wired and wireless telephone networks, and the Internet are all important precursors of the information highway. Each is suggestive of the future. But none represents the actual information highway.
Constructing the highway will be a big job. It will require the installation not only of physical infrastructure, such as fiber‑optic cable and high‑speed switches and servers, but also the development of software platforms. In chapter 3, I discussed the evolution of the hardware and the software platform that enabled the PC. Applications for the information highway, such as those I described in chapter 4, will also have to be built on a platform–one that will evolve out of the PC and the Internet. The same sort of competition that took place within the PC industry during the 1980s is taking place now to create the software components that will constitute the information highway platform.
The software that runs the highway will have to offer great navigation and security, electronic mail and bulletin board capabilities, connections to competing software components, and billing and accounting services.
Component providers for the highway will make available tools and user‑interface standards so it will be easy for designers to create applications, set up forms, and manage databases of information on the system. To make it possible for applications to work together seamlessly, the platform will have to define a standard for user profiles so that information about user preferences can be passed from one application to another. This sharing of information will enable applications to do their best to meet user needs.
A number of companies, including Microsoft, confident that there will be a profitable business in supplying software for the highway, are competing to develop components of the platform. These components will be the foundation on which information highway applications can be built. There will be more than one successful software provider for the highway, and their software will interconnect.
The highway’s platform will also have to support many different kinds of computers, including servers and all the information appliances. The customers for much of this software will be the cable systems, telephone companies, and other network providers, rather than individuals, but consumers will ultimately decide which succeed. The network providers will gravitate toward the software that offers consumers the best applications and the broadest range of information. So the first competition among companies developing platform software will be waged for the hearts and minds of applications developers and information providers, because their work will create most of the value.
As applications develop, they will demonstrate the value of the information highway to potential investors–a crucial step, considering the amount of money building the highway will require. Today’s estimates put the cost at about $1,200, give or take a couple of hundred dollars, depending on architecture and equipment choices, to connect one information appliance (such as a TV or a PC) in each U.S. home to the highway. This price includes running the fiber into every neighborhood, the servers, the switches and electronics in the home. With roughly 100 million homes in the United States, this works out to around $120 billion of investment in one country alone.
Nobody is going to spend this kind of money until it is clear that the technology really works and that consumers will pay enough for the new applications. The fees customers will pay for television service, including video‑on‑demand, won’t pay for building the highway. To finance the construction, investors will have to believe new services will generate almost as much revenue again as cable television does today. If the financial return on the highway is not evident, investment money isn’t going to materialize and construction of the highway will be delayed. This is just as it should be. It would be ridiculous to do the buildout until private firms see the likelihood of a return on their investment. I think investors will become confident of such a return as innovators bring new ideas to the trials. Once investors begin to understand the new applications and services and the potential financial payback for the highway infrastructure is proven, there will be little trouble raising the necessary capital. The outlay will be no greater than that for other infrastructures we take for granted. The roads, water mains, sewers, and electrical connections that run to a house each costs as much.
I’m optimistic. The growth of the Internet over the past few years suggests that highway applications will quickly become extremely popular and justify large investments. The “Internet” refers to a group of computers connected together, using standard “protocols” (descriptions of technologies) to exchange information. It’s a long way from being the highway, but it’s the closest approximation we have today, and will evolve into the highway.
The popularity of the Internet is the most important single development in the world of computing since the IBM PC was introduced in 1981. The PC analogy is apt for many reasons. The PC wasn’t perfect. Aspects of it were arbitrary or even poor. Despite that, its popularity grew to the point where it became the standard for applications development. Companies that tried to fight the PC standards often had good reasons for doing so, but their efforts failed because so many other companies were continuing to work to try and improve the PC.
Today’s Internet is made up of a loose collection of interconnecting commercial and noncommercial computer networks, including on‑line information services to which users subscribe. Servers are scattered around the world, linked to the Internet on a variety of high‑ and low‑capacity paths. Most consumers use personal computers to plug into the system through the telephone network, which has a low bandwidth and so can’t carry many bits per second. “Modems” (shorthand for modulator‑demodulators) are the devices that connect phone lines to PCs. Modems, by converting to 0s and 1s into different tones, allow computers to connect over phone lines. In the early days of the IBM PC, modems typically carried data at the rate of 300 or 1,200 bits per seconds (also known as 300 or 1,200 “baud"). Most of the data transmitted through phone lines at these speeds was text, because transmitting pictures was painfully slow when so little information could be transferred each second. Faster modems have gotten much more affordable. Today, many modems that connect PCs to other computers via the phone system can send and receive 14,400 (14.4K) or 28,800 (28.8K) bits per second. From a practical standpoint, this is still insufficient bandwidth for many kinds of transmissions. A page of text is sent in a second, but a complete, screen‑sized photograph, even if compressed, requires perhaps ten seconds at these baud rates. It takes minutes to send a color photograph with enough resolution for it to be made into a slide. Motion video would take so much time to transmit it just isn’t practical at these speeds.
Already, anyone can send anyone else a message on the Internet for business, education, or just the fun of it. Students around the world can send messages to one another. Shut‑ins can carry on animated conversations with friends they might never get out to meet. Correspondents who might be uncomfortable talking to each other in person have forged bonds across a network. The information highway will add video, which unfortunately will do away with the social, racial, gender, and species blindness that text‑only exchanges permit.
The Internet and other information services carried on telephone networks suggest some aspects of how the information highway will operate. When I send you a message, it is transmitted by phone line from my computer to the server that has my “mailbox,” and from there it passes directly or indirectly to whichever server stores your mailbox. When you connect to your server, via the telephone network or a corporate computer network, you are able to retrieve ("download") the contents of your mailbox, including my message. That’s how electronic mail works. You can type a message once and send it to one person or twenty‑five, or post it on what is called a “bulletin board.”
Like its namesake, an electronic bulletin board is where messages are left for anyone to read. Public conversations result, as people respond to messages. These exchanges are usually asynchronous. Bulletin boards typically are organized by topics to serve specific communities of interest. This makes them effective ways to reach targeted groups. Commercial services offer bulletin boards for pilots, journalists, teachers, and much smaller communities. On the Internet, where the often unedited and unmoderated bulletin boards are called “usenet newsgroups,” there are thousands of communities devoted to topics as narrow as caffeine, Ronald Reagan, and neckties. You can download all the messages on a topic, or just recent messages, or all messages from a certain person, or those that respond to a particular other message, or that contain a specific word in their subject line, and so forth.
In addition to electronic mail and file exchange, the Internet supports “Web browsing,” one of its most popular applications. The “World Wide Web” (abbreviated as the Web or WWW) refers to those servers connected to the Internet that offer graphical pages of information. When you connect to one of those servers, a screen of information with a number of hyperlinks appears. When you activate a hyperlink by clicking on it with your mouse, you are taken to another page containing additional information and other hyperlinks. That page may be stored on the same server or any other server on the Internet.
