76703.407@compuserve.com (Scott Loftesness W3VS (HamNet)) (03/24/91)
In my reading this week, I came across an exciting article by author
George Gilder in the latest issue of the {Harvard Business Review.}
"Into the Telecosm" urges action at the state and national levels to
begin rapid deployment of a national fiber-optic networking capability
that ultimately would provide a fiber connection to every American
home.
Gilder claims that the rapidly advancing technologies of microchips,
electromagnetic waves, and fiber optics will transform commerce:
"In the next decade or so, microchips will contain a billion or more
transistors, expanding a millionfold the cost-effectiveness of
computer hardware. The terminals on our desks and televisions in our
living rooms will give way to image-processing computers,
"telecomputers" that will not only receive but also store, manipulate,
create and transmit digital video programming. Linking these
computers will be a worldwide web of fiber-optic cables reaching homes
and offices."
The problem, according to Gilder, is that only one of these
technologies - computer power - is developing at a rapid pace. The
big problem area is communications or, rather, the lack of it. "Today
the wiring is holding back what people and boxes can do."
Progress in the computer area is indeed impressive. Gilder cites
quadrulping the number of transistors on a chip every three years and
reductions in the cost of processing power of up to 50% a year as two
examples of the incredible progress being made on the hardware side of
computing. Much of this new power is being put to work on images of
one sort or another. But there is a big problem. The telecommunications
infrastructure can't handle what the new telecomputers require in
terms of information bandwidth. "You cannot send an ocean through
pipes developed for a stream," says Gilder.
"While the efficiencies of decentralized computing spring from the
laws of solid-state physics - the "microcosm" - breakthroughs in
communications will spring from the "telecosm," a domain of reality
governed by the action of electromagnetic waves and in which all
distances collapse because communication is at the speed of light.
The law of the microcosm militates for increasingly distributed
computing; the telecosm enables powerful links between computers. The
challenge is to close the gap between microcosm and telecosm, between
the logical power of computers and the power of their communications."
Gilder points out that much of the work in the computer industry is
devoted to trying to live within the limited bandwidth available on
today's networks, on compression hardware and software products.
Claiming that the communications crisis is more "a failure of
imagination than of technology," Gilder points out that a major piece
of the potential solution is at hand:
"In a crisp formula, Nicholas Negroponte of MIT's Media Lab outlines
the needed change: what currently goes through wires, chiefly voice,
will move to the air; what currently goes through the air, chiefly
video, will move to wires. The phone will become wireless, as mobile
as a watch and as personal as a wallet; computer video will run over
fiber-optic cables in a switched digital system as convenient as the
telephone today."
Citing this "reversal" issue as a key one for policymakers, Gilder
points out that there is plenty of spectrum available for new
innovative services if the FCC's regulations were changed to help
force this shift in delivering video from over-the-air to fiber
optics. Citing the common industry objections to this approach,
Gilder claims "costly fiber optics is just as mythical as scarce
spectrum." The problem is the regulatory environment that prevents
telephone companies from laying fiber to homes.
Fearing a situation analagous to the videotape recorder, Gilder fears
that the delays in deploying fiber to the home will result in the U.S.
again losing a critically important technology leadership position in
optoelectronic technology and that the U.S. fiber optic production
capacity is at exposed to lower cost competition from Japan, a country
that apparently is getting very serious about installing fiber to the
home. Gilder says that although the U.S. still spends far more money
per capita on its communications infrastructure than any other
country, a large chunk of that spending is for private business
networks that will "ultimately be bad for U.S. business and,
ironically, is starving the ultimate distribution system for its
services and products. To open new markets, business leaders need a
national network, not simply a Babel of business networks."
A very important effect of this kind of transition to fiber to the
home, according to Gilder, will be the transition from broadcast to
narrowcast that the technology will now permit. Fiber will enable
cause a shift "from a mass-produced and mass-consumed horizontal
commodity to a vertical feast with a galore of niches and
specialties." Marginal costs of delivering another program choice
drop to almost nothing. The two-way nature of the medium enables a
huge number of new sources of program material, driving the money from
the distribution channel of today to the creators of programming
tomorrow.
Gilder urges business leaders to take action to force the reform of
the "telecom snarl that imperils creativity and progress in computers
and communications." The problem is political. The vested interests
"all focus on the destruction and mobilize to prevent it. In the
U.S., the broadcasters are marshaling their forces to preserve what
they claim are the special virtues of free and universal broadcast
service. The cable industry is fast becoming a political juggernaut -
a group of PACs with coax - moving to prevent the phone companies from
installing fiber-optic networks. Meanwhile, television networks and
manufacturers around the world are holding out the promise of HDTV,
which is the old medium dressed up with a bigger screen and sharper
pictures."
Gilder's article makes very interesting reading for a very interesting
time. In April, the National Telecommunications and Information
Administation (NTIA) of the U.S. Department of Commerce is scheduled
to release its "comprehensive study of the national telecommunications
infrastructure." How strongly will the administration advocate a
dramatic shift in the regulatory enviroment to enable this kind of
national broadband network? As they say on TV, "film at 11."
Scott Loftesness 76703.407@compuserve.com 3801143@mcimail.com
[Moderator's Note: Mr. Loftesness is the Moderator of the Telecom SIG
on Compuserve. (On CIS at any prompt, GO TELECOM). My thanks for what
I will call our best article of the week. Come visit us more often! PAT]peterm@rwing.uucp (Peter Marshall) (03/29/91)
This George Gilder article is interesting and useful; for example, as it points to the upcoming NTIA report on their infrastructure study. On the other hand, it is an all-too-typical example of this sort of writing on technology topics, and of a very common perspective on same. As such, its not-so underlying assumptions are those of a garden variety technological determinism. There is a myopia here that is also typical of the approach to such topics regularly evidenced by the telecom industry and NTIA itself. For example, we have here the positing of a "communications crisis," identification of *the* problem as "regulation," and a rhetoric suggestive of telco press releases. In context, the Gilder article really isn't anything to write home about. Peter Marshall