Free audio, pictures over the Internet: Coming soon
By Steve Gilheany, MBA
Senior Systems Engineer
Archive Builders
Manhattan Beach, CA
The local loop of the telephone line defines the speed of the Internet for most people. The local loop, though, has lacked the speed to make flipping through pages in books or full-motion video available over the Internet. Storage systems for electronic documents also have defined large-scale document storage and video storage as too slow, too unreliable, and too expensive to be consistent with the free paradigm of the Internet.
The next three years on the Internet
But as the cost of switching and transmission over the Internet continues to drop, more and more types of documents can be delivered over it. E-mail is currently a given. Color pictures from Web sites are expected to be high-quality art. Next to come are audio and free phone calls over the Internet. When phone calls become free, telecommuting will become commonplace and travel-disabled individuals will be able to work at many more types of jobs from home.
Ultimately, any job that is limited to answering a phone and viewing a computer screen can be moved to any location in the world. Adding video for free Internet-based videophone calls will even further reduce the need for the physical meetings that are seen as essential for conducting business today.
Two processes are occurring in this area simultaneously:
1. The first process is the use of low-cost digital video cameras for low resolution, low frame rate and intermittent (choppy transmission) videophones.
2. The second process is commercial activity by telecommunications vendors. Telephone equipment vendors such as Nortel Networks in Brampton, Ontario, Canada, and Lucent Technologies in Murray Hill, NJ, are moving to design and manufacture switches and transmission equipment to provide phone service over the Internet.
The latest step in this commercial process was Lucent Technologies’ $20 billion purchase of the computer-networking vendor Ascend in January 1999. This process will introduce "quality of service" protocols on the Internet. The quality of service protocols will eliminate the intermittence of current Internet phone calls.
Quality of service protocols will pave the way for broadcast TV, broadcast HDTV (high-definition television), and finally on-demand TV and on-demand HDTV. The introduction of commercial quality on-demand TV is likely to pay for great technical advances on the Internet without requiring additional payments by users for the technology.
In the case of the Internet’s near-term evolution, the minutiae (technical details that are difficult to make use of) are in the reports that today’s commercial fiber optic transmitters can send 320 Gigabits per second. Transmitters that were under development in March 1998 by Lucent technologies can send 1 Terabit (1 trillion bits) per second, and Internet switches currently being designed can switch 1 Terabit per second (announced by Nortel Networks in October 1998). The Internet switching and transmission infrastructure is almost ready for all the video we could want. The local telephone loop is the last obstacle.
DSL equipment increases connection speed
It is likely that DSL (digital subscriber line) equipment and cable modems will increase the speed of local loop Internet connections available to most users by a factor of 10 to 100 in the next three years. These improvements are possible using the physical cable and telephone plant that is currently in place. However, these changes depend on decisions made by the users’ cable and telephone vendors.
Local loop replacement could occur in a timely manner or at a much slower rate. If local loop vendors place political obstacles in the way, it would then be necessary to build a complete new infrastructure. This would be the equivalent of laying TV cables in urban areas, a process that took about a decade in the United States. The difference in cost between laying a copper and optical fiber link to the home and laying a copper link without fiber is about $10.
Fiber optic local loops have the additional advantage of having the physical capacity to be 10,000 to one million times faster than most users’ existing local loop Internet connections. The actual speed of the fiber optic connection depends on the transmitters and receivers used, just as the speed of copper wire connections depends on the transmitters and receivers used.
Also, as in the case of copper links, the speed of fiber optic links can be increased by upgrading the transmitters and receivers, which will continue to drop in price because of their similarity to computer electronics which quickly are becoming cheaper.
DSL is an example of upgrading the transmitters and receivers on existing copper wire links. For optical transmitters and receivers, there is very substantial headroom in the physical optical fibers for increasing data rates by improving optical transmitters and receivers. Even the 1 Terabit per second data rate mentioned above is still far below the optical fiber carrier frequency (baud rate) of 230 THz (TeraHertz, trillion cycles per second) for fibers designed to carry 1,300 nm (nanometer) light.
Also waiting in the wings, and which might add a measure of destabilization to the market, is Teledesic in Bellevue, WA, backed in part by investor Bill Gates, CEO of Microsoft. By 2003, Teledesic plans to provide up to 64-megabit signals to laptop-sized, roof-mounted antennas and up to 2-megabit up-link signals from the antennas, worldwide, using 288 low earth orbit (850 miles) satellites. The pricing is expected to compare favorably with both local loop and cellular service. Teledesic also plans to make 64-megabit per second up-links available at a higher cost.
The spread of new technologies has always been extremely fast, and it is getting faster. This accelerating rate of change is another problem in minutiae: We have had enough change on the Internet, and we are not ready for any more. Many people already are planning their systems as though the Internet will stay forever the way it is today.
This is not the case. The Internet is going to change more in the next three years than it has changed in the last three years, and for most people, the Internet did not exist three years ago.
[Editor’s note: Gilheany holds certifications for document imaging and information technology from several industry associations and has 17 years’ experience in document imaging. He can be reached at (310) 937-7000 or through e-mail at SteveGilheany@Archive Builders.com. For more information on this topic and others, visit the company’s Web site at www.archive builders.com.]
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