While the information superhighway is now under construction, it will not be fully utilized until the issue of high bandwidth access is addressed. The addition of high-bandwidth to the existing infrastructure will be historic. It will be the first major "widening" of what could be fairly described as an "Information Route 66" -- a two lane road that got you there reliably, but none too fast.
Based almost entirely on copper, the existing "POTS" network was designed strictly to carry analog voice signals. In other words, access to the Internet as we know it runs on a medium that hasn't changed significantly since 1855, when the first open-wire line connected Boston with New York. While the modem industry has boosted performance impressively, the compression technology that has made this possible is limited. Meanwhile, the market for voice networking is saturated. Future growth will come not from adding people to the system, but from carrying more data to support a broad array of emerging digital services.
The enabling technologies
There are two basic technologies for higher bandwidth transmission that will change the way we view the Internet. The first is Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN). This network technology, whose deployment is just now beginning to accelerate, addresses the growing needs of digital data communication in a variety of industries and applications. ISDN allows a single line to transmit from 64Kb up to 1.544 Mb while providing superior quality of service over lower speed analog transmissions. ISDN's use of digital communications and sharing of long-distance lines and network control allows it to easily scale-up to wide area networking on a global scale.
The second technology is Asynchronous Transfer Mode, or ATM, which is becoming the high bandwidth technology for realtime multimedia support and bandwidth on demand. ATM is the broadband standard for ISDN. Where ISDN stops at 1.5Mb, ATM starts at 25Mb and goes up to the multi-gigabit range.
For the short-term, ISDN will be the preferred technology to make high bandwidth more immediately available and affordable, while ATM will make up the high-speed backbone.
Unlimited bandwidth
The real revolution in high bandwidth transmission will come when today's copper wiring is replaced with widespread access to fiber optic cable. Fiber optics is not new. An AT&T lightwave system was field tested in Chicago in 1977. But a transmission network is no faster than its weakest link, and while fiber for the nationwide backbone is reasonably complete, more work needs to be done to bring fiber to the user's premises. Construction has already begun. Phone companies, cable companies, and in some parts of the world even utility companies, are laying out fiber along their right-of-ways, all the way up to the curb.
But once fiber is in place, the world will change. Fiber-optic cable can deliver hundreds of megabits per second of data, voice and video to every house in America. Nicholas Negroponte, director of MIT's Media Lab, once pointed out that we don't have any feel for such quantities.
"We can imagine a book a couple of inches thick, but not a book a mile thick," she said.
Engineers habitually conserve bandwidth because it has been expensive, and many of today's applications were developed with conservation in mind. But ultimately, limited bandwidth will no longer be an issue. The principal challenge will be in trying to make use of the extra capacity.
A good analogy has been made between bandwidth and the transistor, which, when produced in volume, was so inexpensive that the competitive edge went to technologies that used them extravagantly, not efficiently. The same is true for bandwidth. The best technologies will use it almost to excess, resulting in more innovative services. In addition to exchanging e-mail, we may also exchange audio or video clips. Since we now have digital cameras, this means that we will be replacing film. You will upload pictures of the baby's first Christmas over the network, even multicast them simultaneously to all the relatives. And following a recipe will very easy. You will get video and sound, just like the TV cooking shows, not just text like in traditional cookbooks. Point and click at 'recipes,' pull down Beef Stroganoff for two and off you go!
Today's applications point to future
So what will today's applications look like when you put true high bandwidth services into the equation? The impact of the information superhighway will both improve the quality of life and reinvigorate the global economy. For example, if I want an African artifact for my living room, I will go on to the World Wide Web and order it from a firm in Africa. I can see pictures of it and order on-line and have it shipped UPS.
Quality of life is improved by quicker, easier access to information. Encyclopedia Britannica is now on the Web with a powerful search engine called WAIS. You type in 'Russia' and everything about Russia in the entire encyclopedia is at your fingertips.
Let's consider one example: long-distance learning. Today at Sun Microsystems, we have an arrangement with Stanford University where our engineers can tune into specific lectures, which we pay for on a flat fee basis. The arrangement is possible because of a dedicated high-bandwidth connection between Sun and the university. But what if fiber ran everywhere? One could imagine a "lecture server" that stores not just the text, but the complete video, of academic lectures given around the world. A user might query the system for a lecture on gallium arsenide semiconductor technology, delivered over the last 30 days. The server might retrieve one from a conference in Tokyo, establish a fee, complete the transaction, and download the video.
Telemedicine is another promising application for high bandwidth. A demonstration facilitated by Sun VAR Apunix Computer Services (San Diego, Calif.), for example, showed how a remote mobile army surgical hospital could be linked via satellite to Walter Reed Army Hospital -- enabling a specialist to monitor emergency operations thousands of miles away. Pacific Bell is testing an application that will link the radiology departments of five hospitals to create one massive image database, with realtime video conferencing.
Telecommuting represents a large potential market for high-bandwidth networking. While the ranks of telecommuters are growing, telecommuting will truly become viable when people can have the same environment and resources at their homes as they do at their offices. This means that all data and applications must live not just on the server, but on the network, where they can be accessible from anywhere. The demand is already here. Los Angeles County, for example, now requires that larger employers must have an alternative plan on record, which means a choice of van pooling and public transit and/or telecommuting.
Finally, there are the myriad services already starting to crop up on the World-Wide Web, a hypertext system that makes it easy to locate information on the Internet. These service will benefit greatly from being delivered on a high-bandwidth network. Sun SITE, a series of worldwide, publicly accessible information repositories, is a good example of what is possible.
Based at locations around the world, Sun SITE offers a wealth of information resources. Users can read the latest White House press releases, hear eminent poets read their work in the Internet Poet Archives, sample rock tunes from the Internet Underground Music Archives, and tour multimedia exhibits from the Library of Congress.
While these services are impressive, Internet access can be slow. Even single-color images can take half a minute to download. Audio and full motion video samples take considerably longer. High-bandwidth access will help address both of these areas, taking the World Wide Web from the realm of experiment to a full-fledged information medium.
Once you have the infrastructure, service providers, and information providers in place, the resulting system will require tremendous amounts of computing resources. It's easy for the user to click a button and have a service show up. But what's sitting behind that screen is, by necessity, a huge engine. In addition, security and authentication will be needed if the network is to support financial transactions, and compute power will be needed to store content, track charges and invoice customers.
The technology industry is only beginning to consider the implications of a truly high-speed network. Network-based services and products are going to create global wealth in the 21st century, just as the assembly line did earlier in this century. The much-touted Information Revolution has only just begin.
Anil Uberoi is group marketing manager of Networking Products at Sun Microsystems Computer Company.