An article in one of the major computer trade magazines recently predicted that soon more of the nation's telephone transmission capacity would be devoted to data rather than to voice. I look at my personal use of a telephone, and for me, that is already true. I probably am on the Internet or email an average of 20 minutes a day, and generally do not make dial 9 phone calls more than maybe 10 minutes a day. Most of my home voice phone usage is spent blowing off sales people at dinner time.
Transmitting data over a phone line has been around for decades, if you include teletype machines. When I was in college in the 60's, before USF had its own computer, we dialed up to Stanford University's time sharing system, using IBM Selectric typewriters connected to 150 baud acoustic modems. My first day on the job at World Wide Widgets 30 years ago was spent reading over the manuals for the General Electric timesharing system, and then later the Tymshare dial in system. Few people today even remember timesharing technology, since a personal computer on your desk can generally provide all the computational horsepower that you would ever realistically need. Fewer people remember acoustic modems.
Modems have increased in speed by two and a half orders of magnitude since those days. And every time technology gives you a faster modem, which six months previously people predicted the technology could never support, after about a month of use we start screaming for something faster, so those pictures can display faster, so those multi megabyte program downloads will roll in faster. Currently, the fastest dial up modems that I know about are 56Kb, which if they transmit the data in a compressed format, effectively transmit maybe twice that amount of actual content. But even at an effective 12K bytes a second, it still takes minutes to retrieve a 1MB data file or program.
In our offices we find Local Area Networks, which can run data at 100 Mb/second, and the technology will soon be available for gigabit transmission speeds. But that is all local coax or fiber connection, and not something you can get to your house over the Plain Old Telephone System, the amichie that you hold in your hand when you are not surfing the net.
For some years now, pundits predicted that a technology named IDSN was going to somewhat solve this problem by bringing 128Kb data to the home. For whatever reason, although it is available, it is hard to get, and is expensive, and so it is not commonly used. Something called ATM was also going to be the solution, bringing hundreds of megabits per second to the home. While this technology now exists also, it is so expensive that only companies with dozens of ports can afford the equipment.
But now, to be a reality right here in Spokane this year, and no doubt in most other areas of the county quite soon, there are two technologies that will be able to deliver multi megabit data to your home at an affordable price. Both of these systems were presented at recent meetings of the Washington Software Alliance, which holds two meetings a month here in Spokane on various technical topics of interest to software developers.
The first system is one that a year ago I loudly proclaimed would never see reality, except in a very few test cities. I appear to be wrong. This technology is Cable Modem. It is a data transmission method that comes to you courtesy of your local cable television provider, which in Spokane is a company named TCI, the US's largest cable tv company.
For about $40/month, TCI (starting in October of this year) will provide a 10 Mb data channel to your home computer. The connection to your computer will be a standard Network Interface Card (NIC), which is to say, an ethernet card. The cable company will provide a box that connects to the cable tv coax, and converts one of the channel signals already there to ethernet format. There are a couple of caveats. First, the data path from your home to the cable will be much slower than the path from the cable to the home. But actually, that is OK, since most of our data activities are downloading data to us from the network, and only a very small amount of our traffic consists of keystrokes from us to the network. Second, this data path is actually shared by up to several hundred of your friends and neighbors. That is, when the service is first delivered to your area, you will get the full bandwidth. But as soon as several other people in the neighborhood also sign up, you will all share that same amount of bandwidth. So if the neighbors's kid is playing world wide doom all day, you will see the effect in your response time. However, TCI has several spare channels available, so if an area does get saturated, they claim that they will just open up another channel and spread the bandwidth over a narrower area.
There is one other little problem, and that is TCI also necessarily becomes your Internet Service Provider, because the data channel from your house goes only to them. You do not have a dial up line at your disposal. Once you connect to them, you can do any kinds of internet stuff, from surfing to mail to newsgroups. But you have to use them as the ISP. They will be providing enhanced services, rather like AOL does, which most local ISPs do not do. But if you want to continue using your faithful local mom and pop ISP, you are out of luck.
The second service to come available, this month in fact, is from US West, our regional telephone company. They will be providing a service they call megabit services, but what is technically ADSL. ADSL uses your existing copper phone line already into your house. They provide a box that provides high speed data to your computer (again via a NIC card), but still lets those same phone lines act as phone lines. That is, no rewiring of the house is required. This technology, like cable modem, provides faster bandwidth to your home than from your home, but generally that is not a problem, unless you are trying to set your home computer up as an internet server or bulletin board or something.
With the ADSL service, you pay for the bandwidth that you want to have. Their basic offering is 256Kb, for $40/month. It goes more or less linear up from there, to $900/month to get 8Mb. They are not your ISP - you have to find one. However, the ISP has to subscribe to this same service, and in Spokane at this time, of the 17 ISPs that exist here, only two have committed to providing this service. You only have point to point service from your house to one ISP. This is not a dial up technology. Also, there are a bunch of restrictions that would prevent your house from having access to this service. Like, you have to be within 18000 ft from a central office, and have true copper wire to that office. My house fails that first test. US West expects that only about 10% of the people in Spokane will actually have access to this technology.
These technologies are direct outgrowths of the deregulation of the communications business that has occurred over the last few years. We see here a cable company starting to get its toes wet doing communications business (maybe some day a dial tone?), and a communications company that is starting to provide high speed products (maybe someday video on demand?) to your home or business. Except maybe for cost, the technologies themselves have been around for many years. The real problem was to find a political means to deliver the data to your house, and the politics have only recently caught up with the technology.
I believe that both of these services are priced very competitively with dial up data access, when you consider that you are getting about an order of magnitude more bandwidth than dial up access can possibly provide. And both of these services are 24 hours a day available. There is no dialing required. It is always there. If you have ever wanted to subscribe to some of the push technologies that have been available on the internet for some time now, but did not think it made sense with a dial up line, here it is. If you want to program your own web spyders to go out and automatically look for specific sites and download them to your computer during the night, here it is. If you want to get those poster pictures onto your system as quick as a flash, with virtually no latency time, here it is.
Since I really don't want any of those things, and since I am still pretty thrilled at the response of a 28Kb modem ( I still remember the 10 character per second days), I probably won't myself be subscribing to either of these services any time soon. But then, my boss continually reminds me, I was a windows hater for several years too.....