| Telephone
Revolution and Networking
(Archive from Nov 1997 - for historic interest. Comment:
It is all accelerating - making the doubling of computer power every
18 months look like solid lumps of unchanging rock. Take a
mobile phone working in 2000 at 9.6k per sec. In less than
two years they will be offering up to 2,000k per sec. That's
a mega-jump!)
By the year 2000 half of all US homes will have two or more lines.
One reason is home-working, a factor in 39 million homes. Most home
workers are self employed but 8.4 million work at home for companies.
These links are likely to dominate Internet communications for years
to come as technology enables more data to be compressed down them
at high speed.
Ordinary lines will carry as much data as
cable soon
In the US the numbers connecting at 28.8kbps
increased from 27% to 39% in six months. Many still have slower
modems. If anyone had suggested in late 1995 that modems would soon
deliver the same speed as ISDN, they would have been disbelieved
by most people. However on 16 October 1996 US Robotics announced
a key breakthrough (v2) allowing modems to run twice as fast as
before on ordinary telephone lines.
However all this could be swept away: British Telecom has just
announced an invention to transmit as much data as cable down two
conventional copper wires. The system will cost £400 and will be
available in two years.(4) BT will be able to transmit live TV to
all those with ordinary telephone lines - a possibility prevented
only by a legal ban imposed to protect cable companies. So BT will
transmit recorded films on demand instead. ATM technology has of
course been well established for some years. Transmitting up to
155 megabits per second down copper wires.
ISDN lines could become obsolete before even established widely.
ISDN has always been seen as the next step up for companies and
wealthy individuals. However as we have seen, ISDN is likely to
be overtaken in two or three years by faster telephone links or
cable perhaps, despite the halving in price of ISDN boards in September
1996, to almost the same as a modem.
Cable modems promise vast capacity for video and sound. Cable has
a theoretical upper speed of 10,000kbps (10mbps) - 80 times faster
than ISDN, 700 times faster than a 14.4kbps modem which was the
standard up until 1995.
By 2000 it is expected that 9 million in the US will own cable
modems, yielding $1.3 billion in earnings for the cable industry.
Motorola is already reported to be preparing to ship one million
cable modems to companies such as Time Warner, TCI and Comcast.
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