Word: bandwidth
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...multiculturalism, for better or worse. Paganism, shamanism, voodoo, gnosticism, santeria--these and scores more are out there, accessible worldwide. So is the expanding pool of freshly coined sects, some of which will presumably survive. All this may seem unimportant now, with so many Websites looking so gray. But as bandwidth grows, the Web will become a dirt-cheap form of television. Imagine hundreds of Billy Grahams, each preaching a different message to a different audience...
...getting your hands on the hardware is only half the battle. Hooking a nonstandard CD recorder up to an industry-standard computer may take a bit of doing--even for someone who's not afraid to read a manual. Then there's the bandwidth problem. Downloading full-length music CDs over even a high-speed modem will clog your phone line for a lot more hours than it takes to drive to the nearest Tower Records and back. That's assuming you can find a full-length version of the music you want. The RealAudio versions of songs that most...
...better wire them up quickly. The telephone companies, eyeing the same potential subscribers, have begun introducing their own high-speed services, including ISDN (integrated-services digital network), which offers four times the bandwidth of a standard modem, and ADSL (assymetrical digital-subscriber line), which approaches cable speed. And the telcos are good at running the complex switching and billing systems required to bring the Net to millions of customers...
...cable companies, by contrast, have a lot to learn. @Home's launch was delayed for months as it struggled to find a way to mesh its high-bandwidth system with the rest of the Internet, which is like an old mansion filled with narrow, twisty corridors and data-clogging culs-de-sac. One @Home innovation is to store data from frequently visited sites in giant computer files called caches--a solution that may not work if those sites change too quickly...
...bigger headache is that unlike the telephone system, cable networks were designed for one-way communication: a single strong signal transmitted down a tree-and-branch system to thousands of passive users who aren't sending any data back. Sending a high-bandwidth signal from head-end to home in such a system is easy; getting thousands of individual signals back upstream--which is what a neighborhood of people E-mailing one another represents--turns out to be a nightmare...