Word: broadband
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...ultimate goal of all these trials is to build what engineers call a switched, broadband network. From the consumers' point of view, this is basically a TV set connected to something that works like the phone system. The wires in this network have to be fat enough (in terms of information capacity, or bandwidth) to carry TV signals. The network must also have switches and software flexible enough to allow movies to be shuttled back and forth without a break in the action, even if thousands of viewers want to see them at different times. And it must have screens...
Some analysts think that by focusing on TV viewers, the companies building these systems may have overlooked a more promising market: the millions of computer users who are already playing games, exchanging mail and entertaining themselves on the computer networks. Although a switched, broadband network could serve both computer users and television viewers, cable-TV operators in particular seem reluctant to allow computer owners to plug in. The cable operators, contends Michael Godwin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a public-interest group involved in electronic communications issues, "have a couch-potato vision of the future...
Once that switched, broadband network is built, it won't matter much what people plug into it -- TVs, PCs or some device that hasn't been invented. Like that of the telephone system before it, the power of the information highway will come from the new ways it allows people to connect, not with machines but with each other. And for that privilege, even the most stubborn couch potato might agree to get wired...
Those were the good old days, when TV signals came over the air and telephone calls came over wire. I remember when we used to say 500 channels were plenty, who needed digital this, two-way that, broadband switching and all that interactive mumbo jumbo? But once people got used to the idea of dialing their TVs like telephones and ordering up shows from the storage disks, things just took...
...serves 9,129 customers in 2,000 U.S. cities and a private telephone system for the Philadelphia-Baltimore-Washington Stock Exchange. Its 30,000-mile facsimile-data-voice net serves the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and a bigger hookup works for the Pentagon. In September, it opened a "broadband exchange service" to 19 cities that not only combines telephone, teletype and facsimile communication but enables computers to send data across the nation...