Word: fiber
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...atmosphere at the New Jersey outpost is crackling. Rather than worry about their jobs or fret about the future, workers walk the corridors smiling and high-fiving each other. AT&T Microelectronics is now a leading source of computer chips used in cellular phones, modems, disk-drive controls and fiber-optic communications. Sales surged about 50% last year, including a 90% increase in Japan and a 110% jump in Europe. AT&T's computer business is in the black and ranks No. 7 in sales, coming up fast behind such world-class firms as IBM, Fujitsu and Hewlett-Packard...
...family members will learn that they do not carry the gene. That does not means that they are immune to colon cancer, just that they bear an average risk (a 1-in-20 chance during their lifetime). The other 25% will probably undergo a colonoscopy, in which a fiber-optic scope is used to search for growths in the colon. The $1,000 procedure would then become an annual routine...
...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...
...long been assumed that nothing was going to change much in telecommunications or television until fiber was brought all the way to the home, a Herculean task that was expected to cost $200 billion to $400 billion and take more than 20 years to complete. The breakthrough that is bringing the info highway home much sooner than expected is the discovery, by both the phone companies and the cable industry, that it is possible to get around the bottlenecks in their respective last miles without replacing the entire system...
...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...