Word: bandwidth
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Dates: during 1993-1993
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With all this variety, Internet users are unimpressed by television's promise of a 500-channel future. The Internet already delivers 10,000 channels, and the only obstacle that prevents it from carrying live TV pictures is the bandwidth (or carrying capacity) of the data lines. Some video clips -- and at least one full-length video movie -- are already available on the network. And last spring, writer Carl Malamud began using the Internet to distribute a weekly "radio" interview show called Geek of the Week. Malamud is undeterred by the fact that it takes a computer about an hour over...
...company's 2 billion- circuit-mile telephone grid. First built in 1879, the network has been continually upgraded. In the past 10 years, AT&T has replaced most of its old- fashioned copper-cable network with advanced fiber-optic wires, which give the grid a massive carrying capacity, or bandwidth. AT&T's long-distance system handles 150 million phone calls and data transmissions a day. It has the capacity to carry at least twice as much traffic, at no greater cost...
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...
...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...