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**************************** G*E*T**W*I*R*E*D*! ***************************


_Wired 1.3_
Monthly column by Nicholas Negroponte,
Director of the MIT Media Lab
*****************************

Message 3:
Date: 6.1.93
From: Nicholas Negroponte 
<nicholas2@wired.com>
To: lr@wired.com
Subject:

Debunking Bandwidth: From Shop Talk to Small Talk
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

When I was an Assistant Professor of Computer Graphics at MIT in the 
late '60s, my career had little meaning at a dinner party. Computers 
were totally outside everyday life. I recall one Boston Brahmin who 
thought that a joy stick was a sex object.

Today, I hear 60-year-old tycoons boasting about how many bytes of 
memory they have in their Wizards, and the capacity of their hard disks. 
Others talk half-knowingly about the speed of their processors (thanks 
to "Intel Inside") and affectionately (or not) about the flavor of their 
operating systems. I recently met one socialite who provides consulting 
services; her business card reads "I do Windows."

Bandwidth is different; it remains a mystery to most. This is true 
because we often have too much when we don't need it or too little when 
we do. 

In addition, we scarcely understand the trade-off between bandwidth and 
intelligence. 

If computer companies were the only players in our wired lives, we would 
experience a greater tendency to compute (apply intelligence) at the 
periphery of the network rather than shipping bits back and forth in 
wholesale fashion. The computer culture has learned from human interface 
research that the most supreme form of interaction is the lack of it. 
Less is more.


Fire Hose Providers
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Telephone and cable companies have a different view. It is in their 
interests to ship as many bits as they can. Look at the fax machine, a 
perfect example of channel capacity (albeit limited to 9,600 baud 
today), which allows us to ship pages in exactly the wrong way. Had the 
world been saddled with the 110-baud rate of the Teletype (requiring 
about 20 to 30 minutes for transmission of a one-page facsimile), ASCII 
and page description languages (PDLs) would have prospered, thereby 
avoiding the extraordinary nosedive of computer-readable information in 
the past decade. I actually have heard a sophisticated computer 
scientist suggest the facsimile storage of books, newspapers, and 
magazines for shipment via gigabit pipes. This suggests an ignorance of 
the value of computer readability and an allergy to hard problems such 
as intelligent PDLs.


The Phone Companies Believe Their Own Arguments
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Judge Greene made a terrible mistake when he barred the Regional Bell 
Operating Companies (RBOCs) from entering the information and 
entertainment industries. It has taken almost ten years to correct this 
error. Ironically, the RBOC lobbyists used a gratuitous but effective 
argument to get into the game. They claimed that unless they became 
content providers, they could not justify the enormous cost of a new 
infrastructure (read: fiber). 

The argument worked. But now some of the telephone companies are 
forgetting just how specious it was: We don't know what to do with that 
bandwidth. We are staring at a $60 billion installed telephone plant of 
copper and fiber that offers enormous untapped opportunity. Worse, the 
Clinton administration is buying the wholesale need for, and provision 
of, bandwidth to maintain a major competitive edge without recognizing 
what Mother Nature and commercial imperatives already provide. More bits 
per second is not an intrinsic good. In fact, more bandwidth can have 
the deleterious effect of swamping people and of allowing machines at 
the periphery to be dumb. 


Two Paper Cups and a String
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I am fond of using the example of a wink as a form of massive data 
compression in human-to-human communication between intimate friends. In 
effect, this is one bit transmitted through the ether that could require 
at least 100,000 bits to explain to a third person. At that compression 
ratio we could transmit more than ten channels of NTSC television over a 
300-baud modem.

There is a tendency to think of the trade-off between bandwidth and 
intelligence as merely a matter of computer cycles in the transceiver. 
But the transceiver should also contain knowledge of the signal. A 
simple example: Store all the static video information from, say, 50 
movies on a CD-ROM (by itself a useless disc) then later, on demand, use 
ISDN to squirt 64 Kbits into this memory to reconstitute any one of 
these movies by delivering only the motion or other inbetweening data. 


Nature's Role in Copper Versus Fiber
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Few people know how good copper twisted pair is. Asymmetrical Digital 
Subscriber Loop (ADSL-1) can provide 1.544 Mbits per second into, and 64 
Kbits per second out of, 75 percent of American and 80 percent of 
Canadian homes. ADSL-2 runs above 3 Mbits per second and ADSL-3, above 6 
Mbits per second. ADSL-1 is fine for VCR-quality video. 

Which would you prefer: 500 channels from which you can choose one, or 
one channel that can be switched to any source on the network?

It is absolutely true that fiber delivers thousands, in fact, millions 
of times more bandwidth. Frankly, we don't really know the limits of 
fiber. In addition, fiber now costs less than copper - when lines are 
updated, fiber will be used, with or without a need for bandwidth. 
Therefore, fiber will come into being automatically through the forces 
of common sense and Mother Nature.


Is That Soon Enough?
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Dates like the year 2005 or 2010 are frequently heard estimates of when 
fiber will pervade the world, given appropriate investments and 
incentives. However, without any new incentives, telephone companies 
update three to five percent of their existing infrastructures each 
year. Some cable companies are proposing updating 80 percent of their 
plant in less than five years. 

But here is the punch line: Why are we worrying about billions of bits 
per second into the home when we haven't used 1.5 to 6 million bits per 
second creatively? Yes, I will need those billions when I watch 
holographic television or expect a can of spinach to be teleported into 
my home. But in the meantime?

Dear telephone companies, now that your argument prevailed, please take 
advantage of your installed base of copper twisted pair, which can 
provide so much more than you are telling people - including video on 
demand, which is really in demand.  n

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Next Issue:  "The Small Vision of the Set-top Box"
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^



(c) 1993 Wired magazine


