The idea of a "national information infrastructure" (NII) is in
the air. The Clinton administration feels the NII can "transform
the lives of the American people" [4], and NII has made the
covers of Time and Newsweek.{footnote 1} The NII is old hat to
members of the computer science community. We have had the
Internet, a {ital}global{ital} information infrastructure, for
many years. But Time Magazine is not focusing on the Internet.
Time is interested in home shopping and movies on demand, not
email and ftp.
Two amorphous groups, let's call them the Internet community and
the interactive TV community, are working on information
infrastructure. While there is similarity in what they envision,
there are also significant differences in the two communities and
their worldviews. This article begins with an update on the
Internet, followed by a description of developments in the
interactive TV community. We conclude with a comparison of the
two communities.
INTERNET UPDATE
I recently attended INET '93, the international conference of the
Internet Society (ISOC), and Interop, the internetworking trade
show. It seems the internet is growing rapidly, becoming
increasingly commercial, becoming increasingly global, and new
ways of accessing the Internet, new "on-ramps," are developing.
Tony Rutkowski, ISOC Vice President, reported that the Internet
is still growing like a weed. It is now around 16,000 networks
in 60 nations, with 1,776,000 hosts as of July, 1993. The
average growth rate for networks in 1993 has been 7.4% per month.
There are many signs of increased commercialization. Most
organizations which build IP internets (small i), register them
with the Network Information Center, whether they connect to the
Internet or not. Rutkowski stated that registrations are growing
at 12% per month, and roughly 75% of those are from business
enterprises. The Internet is positioned to provide the backbone
which glues enterprise-wide and inter-enterprise networks
together. Many businesses have been worried about the lack of
security on the Internet, but encryption and signature
authentication is being designed and deployed. One indicator of
commercial interest is the fact that at least 4 business-related
Internet newsletters began publication during the second half of
1993.
The Internet is in transition from a subsidized experiment to a
commercial service, which requires government policy changes.
One of the INET '93 plenary speakers was Mike Nelson, Special
Assistant, Information Technology, Office of Science and
Technology, who reviewed the White House position. He does not
see the government building infrastructure, but does want it to
fund both research and development on new technology and
connectivity and demonstration projects in schools and libraries.
Nelson also promised government policies to stimulate privately
funded infrastructure development and deployment. Significantly,
he spoke of a global information infrastructure, not merely
national. I was encouraged by his presentation, and by the fact
that someone who works in the Executive Office of the President
has an Internet address and knows what "ftp" and "telnet" mean.
For more on these and other aspects of the administration's NII
vision and agenda, see [4].
Nelson mentioned global infrastructure, and indeed the Internet
is becoming more global. Rutkowski pointed out that it now
reaches 91 nations, and the international network growth rate is
9% per month. (At current rates, international connectivity will
exceed U. S. connectivity around October, 1994). Larry
Landweber, another ISOC vice President, reported that the
Internet could be reached by email from 137 nations as of August,
1993. Since Internet utilization is concentrated in the
industrialized nations, ISOC conducts an annual workshop for
networkers in developing nations. This year 126 people attended
from 67 countries. After the workshop, they attended INET '93,
integrating them into the social network as well.
There are also new ways to get onto the Internet. At Interop,
Zenith, showed a CATV/Ethernet box xx designed for the home user,
and they have plans for related products. LAN City, was also on
hand with Ethernet over CATV. Internet-access provider
Performance Systems International (PSI) announced they would
offer Internet connectivity to customers of Continental
Cablevision. I talked with Marty Schoffstall, PSI's chief
technical officer, who predicted a rosy future for CATV access to
the Internet. He feels the Internet and cable company cultures
are compatible -- both are "cowboys."
Wireless Internet email has been available since 1992 from
RadioMail, and McGaw Cellular, which has been purchased by AT&T,
has promised to begin low-cost packet-switched cellular data
service at the Fall Comdex. Networking pioneer Paul Baran is
developing a system for wireless connectivity over CATV. Even
ISDN has been resurected as a viable path to the office LAN from
home or the road. Forrester Research interviewed 50 Fortune-500
companies, and after considering six alternatives, concluded that
"[by 1995, ISDN] will be the first option to provide affordable,
nationwide, near-ubiquitous, switched digital connectivty for low
volume access." [1] They advise carriers to "roll out [ISDN] or
miss out."
There is even a new Internet "off-ramp." At Interop, Carl
Malamud demonstrated a way to bridge the Internet-fax gap. He
and partner Marshall Rose developed software which lets Internet
hosts receive email messages (text or graphic), and automatically
forward them to a specified fax phone number. The message
forwarder could do this as a free service (perhaps within a
corporation or at a public library). Alternatively, they could
obtain revenue by charging a fee or by printing a paid ad at the
bottom of the fax cover sheet. There are already servers in
several cities, and several companies are buying adds.
Finally, bulletin board systems (BBS), which began with hobbyists
and community information providers, are becoming commercial, and
are connecting to the Internet. Boardwatch Magazine, which
covers BBS, has a regular Internet section, and their annual
conference has an Internet track. In a reader survey, they chose
100 top BBS, and 21 of them offer Internet connectivity or email
[9]. These are not toy systems. Several have over 10 Gbytes on
line, and they average 25 dial-in lines. The largest has 35
Gbytes, and receives 5,000 calls daily on 280 lines. Many BBS
specialize, with topics from community information, software,
Christian values, pornography, and senior citizens to Batman.
Jack Rickard, Boardwatch Editor and Publisher, estimates that
there are 53,000 publically-accessible BBS in North America and
92,000 world wide [6]. This includes 22,000 Fidonet BBS, which
have sophisticated store-and-forward communications between them.
When asked about the Internet, Rickard says, "when somebody can
put an ftp-server/BBS on the Internet for a couple thousand
dollars, it will certainly change the network." It will also be
interesting to see how being networked changes the BBS.
INTERACTIVE TV
For years, there was discussion of an NII by the year 2015 or
2020. The phone companies would extend fiber from the center out
-- first inter-city, then to local exchanges, and finally to the
curb or home. In the interim, we could connect to our digital
networks using modems or ISDN. Judging by the rate of ISDN
deployment, the phone companies were not in a big rush.
The Cable TV industry has accelerated the process. Cable TV
began as a means of getting signals to outlying areas.
Programming came to a head-end, where it was broadcast over
coaxial cable in trunk lines to feeder lines to drops to homes.
Amplifiers were located at quarter-mile intervals along this
network. By 1992 cable ran by 97% of U. S. households and
connected 61% of them {footnote 2} (see Table 1).
To increase capacity, reliability, and picture quality, the cable
companies have been converting trunks from coaxial cable to
optical fiber. It costs only about $50 per subscriber to run
fiber to neighborhood nodes of about 1,500-2,000 homes. The next
step will be the extension of fiber to nodes serving 2-500 homes.
The industry estimates that the cost of converting the U. S.
cable plant in this manner is about $20 billion, compared to $2-
400 billion for a comparable rebuilding of the telephone plant.
The major cause of this savings is that coaxial cable running to
the homes would not be replaced.
At some point, entertainment and cable companies realized this
hybrid network, coupled with improved computing and compression
technology, would soon be capable of delivering digital movies.
If they could provide movies on demand from the safety and
convenience of the home, they could take over the estimated $12
billion [8] annual video-rental business{footnote 3}, justifying
much of the needed investment. Throw in a share of the $70
billion catalog shopping and $4 billion video game markets [8]
and the $2 billion already sold through TV shopping [7], and the
"interactive TV" community was born.
Video On Demand
During the last year, dozens of interactive TV alliances have
been formed between entertainment, cable, phone, and computer
companies. They speak of many applications, but focus first on
video on demand. There have been several market tests in which a
digital system is simulated using operators who manually mount
tapes on VCRs, but automatic, digital testbeds are now under
development. As an example, let's look at one of the most
ambitious trials, set for Orlando Florida in 1994.{footnote 4}
Orlando is served by Time-Warner Cable, a unit of Time-Warner
Entertainment, which has a lot of information to sell.
Approximately 4,000 customers are expected to come on line early
in 1994, with applications including movies on demand,
interactive games, shopping, and distance learning.
Silicon Graphics (SGI) is designing the video-on-demand hardware
and software, and Jim Barton, Vice President of their Media
Systems Division described the project. The head-end hardware
will be a cluster of 14 SGI servers on an FDDI ring. Two of the
machines in the cluster will function primarily as session
managers and transaction processors, and the others will deliver
MPEG-compressed video. The video servers have 1.2 Gbit/s
backplanes, and can have up to 24 processors, 12 Gbyte memory,
and several hundred Gbytes of disk. The FDDI ring will be used
for control and coordination within the cluster. Perhaps 50
popular movies will be on-line at all times, with, the top 10 or
so on multiple servers. Another 5-10,000 movies will be
available on robot-accessed tape, with a few minutes lead time
for mounting.
Small video segments will be transferred from the video servers
to an AT&T ATM switch. Scientific-Atlanta, a leading cable
communication company, will build the hardware which integrates
the head-end with conventional analog equipment. There will also
be two 1.5 Mbit/s channels running back to the head-end.
The network will terminate in TV set-top boxes designed by SGI.
The design was foreshadowed in a SIGGRAPH paper by SGI Chairman
Jim Clark [2]. Clark speculates on a $200 (mid 1990s) box with
MPEG decompression, encryption, display-device independence, and
built-in graphics and image processing capability. The initial
prototype will be a modified Indy workstation with a 100 mhz MIPS
R4000 processor and a Scientific-Atlanta add-in board for
decompression and analog signal processing. There will be no
storage, and relatively little memory. Bootup and client
software management will be handled at the head-end, reducing
system cost. For those who wish to go beyond the basic box,
there will be PCMCIA slots. In an earlier column [5], we asked
whether the home machine would be "compuvision" or "teleputer."
SGI clearly thinks it will be a "teleputer."
There are other interesting video prototypes under way. For
example, Oracle is assuming a less intelligent set-top box, and
designing a video server using an nCube multiprocessor system.
According to John Kish, Oracle's Senior Vice President, Business
Development, they will test it in Omaha with U. S. West as a
partner. Kish says Oracle plans to port their video-server
software to many machines, including SGI's, but they have decided
on a 512-processor nCube machine for this test. (Oracle
president Larry Ellison is a major investor in nCube, but Kish
insists the selection was made independently). Kish expects the
512-processor machine to serve 3,000 video streams, and says the
technology scales well. He envisions serving 100,000 video
streams in a few years, and says the cost of capital equipment
must be around $200 per stream for movies to pay off. Oracle and
SGI have very different architectures -- isn't competition nice?
Shopping -- the Other Application
Shopping has also caught the attention of the interactive TV
community. It is highlighted in popular press accounts, and when
executives discuss financial justifications [7]. Many of
the interactive TV alliances have prepared short, insipid,
concept-demo videotapes showing hypothetical interactive
shopping. They portray virtual travel through malls -- scanning
the shelves till you find something you like, then zooming in to
rotate the object, try different colors, bicker about the
purchase with your spouse (a la Ricky and Lucy), and buy it. The
products demonstrated are things like vases or dresses, never
tractors or staple goods.
If that is what home shopping becomes, I won't spend much time
browsing in the video mall. But, if the NII were to increase the
efficiency of the market for a variety of goods and services, it
would have significant economic impact (as it already has in
capital markets).
Theoretically, an efficient market provides information about
goods and services, and rational, well-informed consumers make
optimal decisions. However, Herbert Simon won a Nobel Prize in
economics for demonstrating that such perfection does not exist
in the real world. Information is not perfect, and it costs.
Furthermore, shoppers have finite cognitive skills and time, so
they do not optimize, they merely "satisfice," making decisions
which satisfy their constraints. The NII could increase market
efficiency by providing both better information and analysis
tools.
Let us consider relatively large purchases first, for example an
auto, appliance, or piece of office or industrial equipment.
(Items you might review on-line, and eventually purchase in
person). One could imagine a comparative shopping service (more
like a database than virtual travel) with information on product
specifications, prices, delivery times, and guarantee terms.
There could be video presentations by manufacturers, independent
product reviews, comments by satisfied and dissatisfied customers
(with their email address), and discussion groups among consumers
and producers. There could also be information to allow
comparison of local distributors or service providers. Such
information would ease Simon's first market limitation. The
second constraint, the consumer's finite rationality, could be
relaxed with tools for discovery, analysis and presentation --
agents, models, and expert systems.
The NII also has the potential to increase market efficiency for
staple goods. I am more curious about the effect of the NII on
supermarkets than on boutiques in malls. It would be convenient
to ask "what will it cost me to purchase the following grocery
list from various stores near me this week." Or to see current
prices for a specific computer or program. This sort of purchase
will be concluded on line, and the line between retailing and
distribution may shift. I really want to know what it will cost
to get the items on the grocery list to my home, not which store
or stores to buy it from. The same goes for software (delivered
electronically), jeans, and much of what I purchase.
While the interactive TV community seems to have taken the lead
on shopping, it might be a better fit with the Internet
community. Interactive TV people seem to envision mass markets
with relatively few vendors. The temperament of the Internet
community points more toward a bazaar than a mass market, with
easy entry and many vendors. The Internet community also has
experience with the sorts of information retrieval and analysis
tools which will underlie the electronic market.
All of this is a bit glib. The interactive TV community is
starting trials in 1994, but widespread rollout will take many
years. Technical innovation and standards are needed, and these
will be followed by a long rollout period, which will begin in
affluent areas. The non-technical questions are more difficult.
For example, will there be alternative comparison shopping
services for a class of item? Will comparison shopping services
charge consumers, be funded by vendors, or be provided as a
common good. The latter possibilities raise questions of
regulation of goods markets, analogous to present regulation of
security markets. What steps would be taken to insure accuracy?
What would be the legal liabilities and procedures? Who would be
able to list products?
Time will also be needed for the established constituencies to
wage battles. For example, the cable TV industry has been a
catalyst, but the phone companies remain a major force. They are
very large and have extensive experience with massive, switched,
reliable, automated, transaction-oriented systems. AT&T is
selling ATM switches and video servers, buying related companies,
and talking about linking local cable providers. The phone
companies are also testing "asymmetrical digital subscriber
lines," a technque for delivering 1.5 mbit/sec compressed video
(VCR quality) over up to 18,000 feet of copper wire. About 80%
of U. S. homes fall within 18,000 feet of a switching office, and
even more businesses do. (Cable TV reaches few business
locations today). Slicing the pie will take time.
TWO CULTURES
With apology to C. P. Snow, the Internet and interactive TV
communities have different cultures, and like Snow's scientific
and liberal arts cultures, they do not communicate so well.
There was little mention of interactive TV at the INET '93
conference or Interop, and little mention of the Internet at the
major interactive TV gathering, Seybold's Digital Media
Conference. The following are some differences between the
communities.
Applications. The bread-and-butter interactive TV applications
are movies and home shopping. The initial Internet dream was
support for a community of scholars, of communication between
people of common interest. The focus has been on text messaging
and information retrieval. These are the applications which
formed the first visions.
Users. The interactive TV community is aiming for users in their
homes while the Internet began with university and research
workers, and is rapidly spreading into business and schools.
Data Types. Interactive TV is being optimized for video from the
start, and the phone companies control audio communication. The
Internet deals mostly with text. There are a few Internet image
archives, and experiments have begun with audio and motion video,
but they are still limited to a few hundred sites and very crude.
Terminal Device. Interactive TV is being designed around low-
resolution television sets which are viewed from a distance and
controlled using a remote channel-selector. The Internet began
with Teletypes, but has really been built around desktop
computers. Both may use voice input in the future.
Geographic Scope. Interactive TV is aiming initially at the U.
S., while the Internet is global.
Media. Interest in interactive TV has spurted with concentration
on cable TV, and the Internet has mostly used the telephone
company. Both are developing wireless options, and in the end,
both will use all three.
Access Ethic. This may be the most important difference. The
interactive TV community is used to centrally produced and
broadcast programming, while free-access, with every user a
portential publisher, is a basic tenet of the Internet.
Economic Orientation. While interactive TV community speaks of
education and community information, potential profit is clearly
their prime motivator. The Internet began in the education and
research community, and only recently began worrying about
charging and commerce. There is still a large Internet
constituency focusing on education and community service. The
Internet community debates the issue of usage-based charges; the
interactive TV community assumes them.
Information Valuation. The Interactive TV community is based on
the sale of copywritten information for royalties, and the
Internet grew from the academic community which often values
information sharing.
Rollout Schedule. Interactive TV trials are just begining. If
successful, broader rollout may begin in 1995, and it will be
many years until a significant number of households and
businesses have interactive connectivity. The Internet is
already in production.
I must admit to a degree of discomfort with the interactive TV
community. After all, it is headed by the folks who bring us
Cops, reruns of Gilligan's Island, and commercials for 1-900
numbers and "workman's compensation" lawyers.{footnote 5} Do we
want them in control of the deployment and application of a
technology that may have as much impact on society and our
worldview as the clock or electric light?
Regardless of who is in charge and what their motivation is, NII
technology will have profound effects. For example, the Internet
was inspired by the lofty goal of support for scholarly
communities, not profiteering. Even in its nascent state, the
Internet has had remarkable success in this dimension. I see it
in my own work, where daily collaboration with remote colleagues
would be impossible without the Internet. On the other hand, my
time is finite, so I have significantly reduced professional
collaboration and social interaction with people at my physical
workplace. My productivity has been enhanced markedly, but my
daily working relationships and organizational loyalty have
shifted. The shift from local to remote is more pronounced when
we consider the mass media. We know Johnny Carson better than we
know our neighbors, and we are touched more deeply by televised
events than those on our own blocks.
Working and playing in cyberspace will change our relationship to
time, abstraction, and people. It will change our values,
perception, and addictions. Regardless of who builds the NII,
let's keep our eyes open.
Table
1975 1980 1985 1990 1992
TV households 70 78 86 93 93
(millions)
Percent of TV 13 23 46 59 61
households served
Homes passed 23 35 65 86 91
(millions)
Percent of TV 33 45 76 92 97
households passed
Table 1, Cable TV Deployment. Cable TV is growing rapidly, and
converting trunk lines to optical fiber. This network may be
used for movies, shopping, and other services. [3]
Footnotes
1. The NII was on the cover of Time on April 12, 1993, and on
Newsweek's cover on xx.
2. The statistics and estimates in this section were taken from
the congressional testimony of Richard Green, President of
CableLabs [3], a research consortium serving the cable
industry.
3. Twenty percent of this revenue is from late charges on
overdue rentals, which would not occur with video on demand.
4. Two-way CATV tests date back to the early 1970s. One of the
earliest was also in Orlando, conducted by Orange Cablevision
[10].
5. Do you know how to fix your TV set? 1) unplug the set 2)
grasp plug in left hand 3) snip it off with a scissors.
References
1. Batson, J. and Hyland, J. L., "Don't Laugh, It's ISDN," The
Network Strategy Report, vol 7, no 7, pp 2-13, Forrester
Research, Cambridge, MA, June, 1993.
2. Clark, J., "A Tele-Computer," Proceedings of SIGGRAPH '92, pp
19-23, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1992.
3. Green, R. R., Testimony before the Subcommittee on
Technology, Environment, and Aviation, Committee on Science,
Space, and Technology, U. S., House of Representatives, March
23, 1993.
4. NTIA (the National Telecommunications and Information
Administration), "The National Information Infrastructure:
Agenda for Action," anonymous ftp from world.std.com,
directory /amo/civicnet, or ftp.ntia.doc.gov, directory /npr.
Those without ftp access can request an email copy by sending
a message to ace-request@ace.esusda.gov. In the body of the
message put: send niiagenda.
5. Press, L., "Compuvision or Teleputer?" Communications of the
Association for Computing Machinery, September, 1990.
6. Rickard, Jack, and Funk, Gary, "The International FidoNet --
22067 Bulletin Boards with an Attitude," Boardwatch, August,
1993, pp 66-80.
7. Zinn, L, De George, G., Shoretz, R., Yang, D. J., and Forest,
S. A., "Retailing will never Be the Same," Business Week,
July 26, 1993, p. 54-60.
8. Zoglin, Richard, "The Info Highway," Time, April 12, 1993, pp
56-61.
9. --, "Boardwatch-100, Readers' Choice BBS Contest Results,"
Boardwatch Magazine, September, 993, pp 68-80.
10. --, "Status Report on Two-Way Testbeds," Cable Television
Information Center, Washington, D. C., May, 1973.
Pointers
If you are interested in the latest developments in the
interactive TV world, three highly recommended newsletters are:
The Inside Report on New Media, which was just formed from the
merger of two excellent newsletters, Bove and Rhodes' Inside
Report on Multimedia and Publishing Technologies and Tom
Hargadon's Green Sheet. 800-222-4863.
Seybold's Digital Media reports on business and technical
issues in the convergence of entertainment, publication
communication, and education. 800-325-3830.
Multimedia Monitor, which covers interactive media, and has
particularly detailed coverage of most relevant conferences.
800-345-1301, 204789@mcimail.com, 71333.2753@compuserve.com.
You can also meet and hear leading executives and technologists
from the converging interactive TV, entertainment, publishing,
and computing companies at Seybold's annual Digital World
Conference, 800-433-5200.
Increased Internet commercialization has inspired the founding of
four industry newsletters:
The Internet Letter, netweek@access.digex.net, 800-638-9335.
The Internetwork Advisor, 578-6914@mcimail.com, 800-999-snci.
The Internet Business Report, locke@cmp.com, 516-562-5882.
The Internet Business Journal, mstrange@fonorola.net, 613-747-6106.
For a bi-monthly magazine on the Internet: Interop World,
meckler@jvnc.net, 203-226-6967.
If you are interested in tracking the global growth of the
Internet, subscribe to Matrix News, mids@tic.com, 512-451-7602.
For information on the Internet Society, the INET '93 Proceedings
and audio tapes, or INET '94, contact the Internet Society,
isoc@isoc.org, 703-620-8990. The INET '93 proceedings are also
available on the ISOC Gopher server.
For a CD-ROM with all of the speaker's slides and papers, and
information on the commercial exhibits at Interop, contact
ImageOnLine, 415-917-2100. Interop audio tapes are available
from Audio Archives International, 800-747-8069, 818-857-0874.
Boardwatch, is {ital}the{ital} magazine for the BBS community.
Like BBSs (and the Internet), it walks a line between hobbyist
enthusiasm and idealism and commercialization. It is always fun
to read. 800-933-6038, subscriptions@boardwatch.com,
For a thorough discussion of BBS technology, history,
applications, philosophy, the Internet and Internet-BBS
connectivity, see Bernard Aboba's eclectic new book "The Online
User's Encyclopedia: Bulletin Boards and Beyond," Addison-
Wesley, Reading, MA, 1993.
Forrester Research surveys Fortune-500 companies, and publuishes
the results and their analysis in a monthly Network Strategy
Report. They publish similar Software Strategy and Computing
Stragegy Reports. It is like having a consultant on retainer.
617-497-7090.
For information on Carl Malamud's Internet-fax gateway, send a
request to tpc-faq@town.hall.org.
Silicon Graphics is interested in talking with potential
developers for the Orlando trial. 415-960-1980.
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