Word: bandwidths
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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What makes the marriage of the two industries so compelling is that each has something the other needs. The TV operators have built extensive networks of coaxial cable with enough information-carrying capacity (or bandwidth) to broadcast hundreds of TV channels simultaneously. The phone companies badly need that cable to replace their narrow copper wires, which can barely carry a single TV station. At the same time, phone companies have sophisticated switching and billing systems that the cable companies would otherwise have to build from scratch...
...miles thick, is the most perfect transmitter of information ever invented. A single strand of fiber could, in theory, carry the entire nation's radio and telephone traffic and still have room for more. As it is deployed today, fiber uses less than 1% of its theoretical capacity, or bandwidth, as it's called in the trade. Even so, it can carry 250,000 times as much data as a standard copper telephone wire - or, to put it another way, it can transmit the contents of the entire Encyclopedia Britannica every second...
...problem comes when you get off the turnpike onto the roadways owned by local phone companies and cable-TV operators. Some of these are being converted to high-bandwidth fiber optic. But at the end of almost every local system - the "last mile" that goes from the local-service provider to the house - you run into the electronic equivalent of a bumpy country road. In the phone system, the bottleneck is that last bit of copper wiring, which seems far too narrow to admit the profusion of TV signals poised to flow through it. In cable TV, the roadblocks...
...cable-TV companies, the key insight came in the fall of 1987, when $ cable engineers demonstrated that coaxial wire could carry information quite effectively over short distances; in fact, for a quarter-mile or so, it has almost as much bandwidth as fiber. They pointed out that by using fiber to bring the signal to within a few blocks of each home and coaxial cable to carry it the rest of the way, the cable companies could get a "twofer": they could throw away those cranky amplifiers (giving them a system that has more capacity and is easier to maintain...