Proceedings of ENTER '95, Innsbruck Austria, January 18-20, 1995
This paper begins with a summary of the current state of the Internet, noting that it is growing rapidly, becoming increasingly commercial and global, and that new means of access are emerging.
The next section contrasts the Internet with interactive television along several dimensions: applications, data types, terminal devices used, geographic scope, media, access ethic, economic orientation, rollout schedule, and method of capital formation. Characteristics such as decentralized access and capital formation will facilitate the development of of travel services.
The third section gives examples of experimental travel-related services on the Internet: descriptions of cities or other areas, restaurant reviews, cultural resources, utility services, airline reservations, tourist attractions, general travel locations, travel agents, reservations at chain hotels, hotel reservations in a city, and hotel descriptions.
We conclude that the Internet and travel applications are still embryonic, but they may have far reaching implications for travel and other industries.
There are several discernible Internet trends -- it is growing rapidly, becoming increasingly commercial, becoming increasingly global, and new ways of accessing the Internet, new "on-ramps," are developing.
The Internet is large and growing rapidly. Between January 1993 and January 1994, the number of hosts grew from 1,313,000 to 2,217,000, and by October, 1994, it was 3,864,000 [7]. Based on the average growth over the past four years, there will be 100 million hosts in 1st quarter 1999 [8].
Estimating the number of users on the Internet is made difficult by the facts that it is growing rapidly, the technology precludes an exhaustive survey, and there are varying classes of access. The most reliable estimate of the number of users and hosts in three categories, as of October, is shown in table 1 [15]. Note that those estimates are only for organizations which are registered in the Internet domain naming system. Many others can exchange email with the Internet.
Table 1 shows that the number of people who can provide and/or access Internet services (13,500,000) is approximately equal the population of Chile. The Internet is not as heterogeneous as a physical nation such as Chile. Women comprise only about 13% [19] of the Internet, and it is a relatively highly educated, affluent population.
There are many signs of increased commercialization [12]. The ".com" (commercial) domain is now the largest, and grew by 36 percent during the third quarter 1994 to 1,054,422 hosts [8]. 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 firewall computers are now commonly installed between a company network and the Internet. Standards and software for encryption and secure transaction processing and payment are also being developed and deployed, and there are already many Internet-based "malls" and "markets" and businesses.
The Internet is becoming more global. According to Landweber [9], 81 political units are directly connected to the Internet, and 68 others have email connections (see Table 2). Regional growth is fastest in Latin America (see Table 3), and while the U. S. is approximately 50% of the Internet, it is falling. It is U. S. policy to encourage globalization [5].
There are also new ways to get onto the Internet. Performance Systems International (PSI) is test-offering Internet connectivity via cable TV, and companies such as Zenith, Intel, and DEC are offering cable TV modems. Although there are technical and marketing hurdles to be overcome, Marty Schoffstall, PSI's chief technical officer, predicts a rosy future for Cable TV 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 several vendors are introducing cellular packet- switched data services at 19.2 kbps. Metricom is offering spread spectrum connectivity at 56 kbps in several areas. Around the turn of the century, we may see satellite-based access. Perhaps the most ambitious satellite venture may be Teledesic, which plans a network of 840 low-earth orbiting ATM switches.
ISDN has finally spread to the point where it may become the preferred method of reaching 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 connectivity for low volume access." [1]
Of course, the switched phone network continues to be the most common means of Internet access when away from the office. The first commercial access providers were new startup companies, and some have grown quite large. Within recent months, the large on- line services, America on Line, Compuserve, Prodigy, and others have all committed to providing Internet access. Perhaps most important, MCI, one of the major U. S. long distance phone companies, has just announced an aggressive Internet access offering.
Dial-up bulletin board systems (BBS), which began with hobbyists and community information providers, are becoming commercial, and 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 [20]. 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 publicly-accessible BBS in North America and 92,000 world wide [16]. This includes 22,000 Fidonet BBS, which have 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.
There is even a new Internet "off-ramp." Carl Malamud and Marshall Rose have 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.
While the Internet is rapidly expanding, it is not synonymous with "information infrastructure" or "information super highway" in the U. S. Companies from the movie, television, cable TV, telephone, computer, and other industries are working on many plans to bring digital, interactive entertainment, shopping, and other services to the home and office. While they have not yet reached the production stage, there are dozens of field trials beginning in 1995 in the U. S.
While the initial impetus for this interest and these trials came from the desire to deliver movies on demand to homes, there is also much talk and development of means of interactive shopping, which is more relevant to the travel industry. The Internet has the potential to make markets more perfect and enhance the consumers ability to find and analyze choices.
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 communicate poorly. They do not attend each other's conferences or, in many cases, even seem aware of what the other is doing. Still, in the long run, they will converge or at least be linked via gateways. We can broaden our sketch of the evolving information infrastructure in the U. S., by contrasting the Internet and interactive TV communities.
The Interactive TV community is justifying its investment with plans for movies and home shopping. Those are the applications featured in their demonstration video tapes and in discussions with technologists. They also promise to bring us single and multi-player games, and education is invariably mentioned as a possibility, though one has the feeling that it is a poor cousin, perhaps because the players do not have experience in that sector.
Much of the initial vision and funding for the Internet was due to J. C. R. Licklider, the first head of the Information Processing Techniques Office at ARPA (the Advanced Projects Research Agency of the Department of Defense). Licklider sketched an outline for what he called an "intergalactic" network, and was influential in providing funding for the ARPAnet, which evolved into the Internet. The application Licklider envisioned was support for a community of scholars:
What will on-line interactive communities be like? In most fields they will consist of geographically separated members, sometimes grouped in small clusters and sometimes working individually. They will be communities not of common location, but of common {it}interest{it}. [10: 30]The first applications were remote login and file transfer. Electronic mail was soon added [11]. These are still the basic Internet services, but an extra level of tools to integrate distributed servers, e. g., Gopher, Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS), and World Wide Web (WWW), have increased efficiency and ease of use.
Internet and interactive TV applications are different, because they serve different users. Interactive TV is targeting the consumer at home, and the Internet has broadened in focus from scholars and computer scientists to include students at all levels and business people. This diversification seems likely to continue in light of the U.S. government having called for connectivity for all classrooms, libraries and clinics. [4]
While interactive TV is being designed for video from the start, and the phone companies control audio communication, the Internet deals primarily with text, numbers, and still images. Experiments have begun with real time audio and motion video, but they are still limited to a few hundred sites and very crude. Today's packet-switched Internet is poorly suited to isochronous transmission needed for smooth, interactive audio and motion- video communication.
Interactive TV is being designed around low-resolution television sets which are viewed from a distance and controlled using a remote channel-selector, a configuration which is poorly suited to the volumes of text common on the Internet. It is well suited to pointing and selecting, games, and relatively infrequent interaction, such as the "VCR" controls on movies. It may also work well with some forms of browsing and shopping, but much comparison shopping and analysis involves text and numeric data presentation and analysis.
The Internet began with Teletypes, but has really been built around desktop computers. Technology improvement will enable better user interfaces and more interaction. The hardware differences between TV sets and computers may eventually disappear, but the attitude and viewing positions are quite different.
While there is some activity in Europe, the bulk of investment in Interactive TV trials is planned for relatively affluent areas in North America. On the other hand, as we saw above, the Internet has been expanding globally for many years.
In spite of the impressive global spread of the Internet, there are some sobering concerns [3, 13]. About one fifth of the world's population has access to far more capability than the rest. There is a direct correlation between measures of national development and the quality of network services available to advanced industrial and less developed countries (LDCs) [17]. The connectivity to an LDC may be as little as a Fidonet link to a few PCs with a handful of regular users. Even within the most advanced, well connected countries the majority of the populations have little or no participation. For example, despite the much proclaimed connectivity of U. S. universities, where access is almost a free good, Internet utilization is generally confined to a minority of faculty and students. Going beyond universities, U. S. connectivity is concentrated in urban areas and is relatively sparse in regions such as the Midwest and in poor regions and neighborhoods. These discrepancies are most probably greater in developing nations.
Historically, the Internet has used telephone company facilities, with the U. S. backbone growing from 56 kb/s to T3 speeds. Connected networks typically use telephone company facilities, running from these speeds down to switched connections using analog modems. Only now are we seeing the beginning of low-speed wireless and cable TV-based access.
The interactive TV community originally thought of using an augmented telephone network, but is now also heavily involved with cable TV. Both Cable TV and the telephone companies seem to be converging on network architectures that bring optical fiber to local centers (2-500 users), and coaxial cable from that point on. The conversion of trunk lines to optical fiber has been proceeding rapidly in both industries for some time.
The differences between telephone and cable TV companies may, in the long run, become blurred as they begin offering competing services, but for now, they have different experience. The telephone companies have a tradition of providing a highly- reliable, automatically transaction-billed service, and seamless global interoperability. By contrast, cable companies typically do flat monthly billing, tolerate service interruption, and serve limited areas. Cable TV is installed in over 60% of U. S. homes [6], but is uncommon in business (see Table 4). The phone companies cover business and homes. (About 80% of U. S. homes fall within 18,000 feet of a switching office, and even more businesses do). The telephone companies are also used to universal access and symmetrical, two-way transmission. Finally, the telephone companies are very large, profitable and wealthy.
From the standpoint of the travel industry, this may be the most important difference. The interactive TV community has a history of highly centralized access. In industries like entertainment, news, and TV-shopping, there are few information providers and many consumers.
Low-cost access, with every user a potential publisher, is a basic tenet of the Internet [14]. Even the design and implementation of the Internet protocols is done using the open, democratic mechanism of published Requests For Comment, which may originate with anyone in the community. Falling computer and communication costs, improved publishing tools, and well established server protocols like WWW and Gopher, are broadening the publisher base. Even students in my introductory classes learn the rudiments of WWW publishing. There are now over 10,000 WWW servers, and it is the fastest growing protocol on the Internet. It is being used for both in-house and external publishing.
We have been speaking of access by publishers, but access by users is also an issue. The U. S. administration hopes to avoid a gap between those who have and do not have network access. This possibility was foreseen by the initial Internet community. In 1968, Licklider and Taylor, wrote:
Will 'to be on line' be a privilege or a right? If only a favored segment of the population gets a chance to enjoy the advantage of 'intelligence amplification,' the network may exaggerate the discontinuity in the spectrum of intellectual opportunity. [10: 31].Regulatory and funding pressure will probably make this an issue for both the Internet and interactive TV communities.
While the interactive TV community speaks of education and community information, potential profit is clearly their prime motivation.
The Internet began in the education and research community. When the National Science Foundation (NSF) began providing backbone connectivity in the U. S., acceptable use policies prohibited commercial activity; however, it was planned that NSF would eventually withdraw, and there would be a transition to commercial use (which has begun). Still, the growing appearance of commercial activity on the Internet is relatively new, and there remains a large constituency focusing on education and community service. The Internet community debates the issue of usage-based charges; the interactive TV community assumes them.
This difference in economic orientation also grows from the attitudes of the two communities toward the price of information. The Interactive TV culture is based on the sale of copywritten information for royalties, while the Internet grew from the academic community which values information sharing. (Though both reward early publication).
While there were some early trials using manual simulation of Interactive TV, two-way digital trials are just beginning. If they are successful, broader rollout in affluent parts of North America will begin in the latter half of the century. It will be many years until a significant number of households and businesses have interactive connectivity.
If we extrapolate current trends, we can expect that by that time, the Internet will have grown significantly, will have a higher percentage of commercial utilization, and will support a wider variety of data types and users. On the other hand, it may still be poorly suited for the distribution of movies and other connection-oriented communication.
The method of capital formation on the Internet is in keeping with its democratic access ethic. While the original technology was developed (and is being extended) by the U. S. government, and backbone services were subsidized during the startup period, the bulk of the capitalization has come from users. User- supplied hardware, software, communication links, and staff account for nearly all of the investment in the Internet.
The interactive TV community, like the on-line services industry, follows the more traditional model of a controlling entrepreneur raising capital to finance necessary investment. While the Internet is often criticized as being government funded, both communities seem committed to the adminstration goal of private investment. The difference is not government vs. private, but centralized vs. decentralized funding. Hh2>Internet Travel Examples
While there has been travel information on the Internet for many years, it has spurted with the introduction and rapid spread of WWW servers. The WWW offers several advantages over FTP, Telnet, and Gopher servers. The WWW allows images, sound and video as well as text and numeric data, and it is extensible so new data types can be added. Today the cost of sound and video is high, so it is uncommon, but that will change over time. The WWW has a fairly general, hypertext-based user interface, which has allowed implementation of attractive services. Next-generation presentation extensions are now being defined. It is also possible to supply custom programs which are executed at the server in response to user input, allowing order taking and other interactive applications. Let's look at a few examples of travel-related information using on the WWW.
Many cites, states, regions and even nations have established WWW servers. For example, Professor Hermann Maurer, of the Institute for Information processing and Computer supported new Media, is experimenting with extensions to the basic WWW protocols. As an illustration, he has created a WWW server, http://hyperg.iicm.tu- graz.ac.at, with photos and information on the province of Styria and the City of Lenz and their tourist attractions and universities. A more extensive example of a city home page covers Paris, http://meteora.ucsd.edu:80/~norman/paris (available in both French and English). It includes descriptions of monuments, museums, special expositions, stores and shops, cafes, an event calendar, and an interactive metro map.
There are collections reviews of restaurants in a number of cities, for example, the Boston Restaurant List, http://www.osf.org:8001/boston-food/info-serv.html. This service is particularly interesting because it has been available on the Internet (initially via usenet news) for two years and includes reviews of approximately 1,000 restaurants. It has been available as a WWW server since March, 1994, and the creator, Ellis Cohen, a computer scientist, has given considerable thought to this and review-based services in general. For a discussion of protocol extensions needed to improve the user interface, query mechanism, links to and from related servers and management considerations like incentives to contributors and scaling, see [2].
There are many travel-related cultural resources on the Internet. For example, there are usenet news lists for many nations and cultures. Another interesting example of a culturally-related resource is the Human Language server, http://www.willamette.edu/~tjones/Language-Page.html, which contains dictionaries, tutorials and much more information on 43 languages. There is also a collection of multilingual resources such as dictionaries, electronic text archives, and language teaching material. While there is more information on some languages than others, the potential is exiting. This sort of facility could only be done on a decentralized system like the Internet, where each language is supported by local experts.
There are utility services such as currency conversion, http://www.ora.com/cgi-bin/ora/currency, weather, telnet://madlab.sprl.umich.edu:3000/, and railroad schedules and information, http://www- cse.ucsd.edu/users/bowdidge/railroad/rail-gopher.html.
EAASY SABRE, American Airlines and TRAVELSHOPPER, Worldspan (formerly PARS) are available on commercial services like Compuserve, but not on the Internet at this time. One can access the On-Line Official Airline Guide directly on the Internet, but there is a charge to use it.
Canadian Airlines has an experimental WWW server with schedule information at http://www.cdnair.ca, and PC Travel, http://www.nando.net/pctravel.html, is an on-line travel agency that lets users check fares and schedules, and make reservations at no cost. Tickets are paid for with a credit card, and delivered via Federal Express. They also include promotions on various destinations, flights, coupons, cruises, tours, and so forth.
Every tourist attraction may one day have a home page on the Internet. For example, the Grand Canyon National Park, http://www.kbt.com/gc/gc-home, has a history, maps and trail maps, hike descriptions, photos, listing of services, books and guides, and links to other things to see and do in the area.
There are several general interest locations on the WWW which have large amounts of general travel information. Three of these are at Stanford University, http://akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo/bin/menu/Entertainment/Travel, IBM, http://www.IBM.net/, and O'reilly and Associates, http://nearnet.gnn.com/gnn/meta/travel/index.html. There is considerable overlap among these sites, and they link to each other.
National and International hotel chains are also establishing WWW sites. The hotels provide their own descriptions, plus descriptions of the surrounding area and attractions. THISCO, The Hotel Industry Switch Company, has established a WWW server, http://www.travelweb.com/travel.html, which links them together. This server links to 48 prominent national and international hotel chains, and it will soon allow users to reserve rooms on- line.
San Francisco Reservations, http://hotelres.com/, currently represents 43 hotels of varying price and style in different parts of San Francisco. Users may search for hotels by location, price, type and key word in the description. They may see hotel descriptions, specials, and vacancy information. They may also make reservations and retrieve other travel-related information.
For the WWW to become ubiquitous, restaurants, tourist attractions, hotels, and so forth will have to maintain their own descriptions, and there will be services to assist them. For example, http://www.fractals.com/rgi/html/rgi_intro.html, provides assistance with hotel descriptions and order forms.
At present, Internet commerce is embryonic and experimental -- giving a glimpse of things to come. Material is incomplete and poorly organized, user interfaces are primitive, and the number of users is small. Each of these and other shortcoming will have to be addressed before it can become a major force in travel or other industries. While there is much to be done, all of these problems are being addressed and may be solved.
The incompleteness of the information on the Internet can only be overcome by decentralized development, but that is the cornerstone of Internet technology and culture. To be viable, a critical mass of organizations -- individual hotels, travel agents, travel book publishers, museums, zoos, theaters, restaurants, auto rental agencies, cities, mass-transit systems, and so forth must be on the Net. This can only be done by the organizations themselves. An industry association or commercial company may set the template -- as the Boston Restaurant List has done for restaurants or THISCO has done for hotels -- but the individual organizations will have to provide and maintain their own descriptions. Once a critical mass of material is present, it will be organized by information editors and custom.
User interfaces are still primitive. Today, on the WWW, users fill in forms, and get responses. That is clumsy and slow, and faster interaction, such as we are used to on our personal computers is needed. When you change a word on the screen with your word processor, you see the results immediately. The same must be true of database searching and browsing. (For an excellent example, see [18]). Technological advances in computing and communication will make improvement in user interface possible.
Today the number of users on the Net is small, but it is growing exponentially. It is also a very select group -- mostly young, affluent, educated men. That will have to change if the Net is to have a major impact on travel and other industries. It should be noted that there is political debate and discussion of the desirability of widespread access to the Internet.
Let's assume that in 20 years most hotels, restaurants, etc. in the world have a presence on the descendent of the Internet. What changes will that dictate?
Which jobs and organizations will be eliminated? In the past 100 years, there has been a tremendous shift of employment out of agriculture and domestic service in developed nations. Will there be similar shifts out of information providing and market- making industries such as travel?
What new jobs will have been created? The people displaced from agriculture and domestic service have moved into manufacturing, service, communication and other sectors. Will there be a larger proportion of people providing tourist services -- transportation, accommodation, entertainment, and so forth?
Will business travel be increased or decreased as the Internet moves to the mainstream? On one hand, communication may often be substituted for transportation, on the other, new contacts and opportunities will lead to new travel. The same question might have been asked about the telephone.
What of the impact on tourism? While virtual travel may to some extent cut into real travel in the long run, for the foreseeable future, this will not be the case. If the Internet leads to lower cost and increased convenience and awareness of interesting places to visit, it can only stimulate tourism.
It is often said that people underestimate the time for a technology to spread, and underestimate its impact. To become truly important, a technology must become ubiquitous and taken for granted. Such things as clocks, telephones, and electric lights have done so. I expect that the Internet will evolve into a similar invisible, but culture and mind-shaping technology, affecting travel and much more.
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. Cohen, Ellis S., "Review-Based Information Services: Lessons Learned from the Boston Restaurant List," WWW '94 Conference, Chicago, http://www.osf.org:8001/boston-food/info-serv.html.
3. Goodman, S., Press, L., Ruth, S., and Rutkowski, A., "The Global Diffusion of the Internet: Patterns and Problems," Communications of the ACM, Vol 37, No 8, pp 27-31, August, 1994.
4. Gore, Al, "Remarks at Royce Hall, UCLA," Los Angeles, January 11, 1994. Anonymous ftp, sunsite.unc.edu, pub/academic/political-science/internet-related/VP-Speech-at-UCLA
5. Gore, Al, "Remarks Prepared for Delivery, International Telecommunications Union," Buenos Aires, March 21, 1994. Anonymous ftp, sunsite.unc.edu, pub/academic/political- science/internet-related/Gore's-Delivered-Remarks-on-NII-12-21-93
6. 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.
7. http://www.nw.com.
8. http://www.isoc.org
9. Landweber, Larry, "The Connectivity Table," anonymous ftp, ftp.cs.wisc.edu, connectivity_table directory.
10. Licklider, J. C. R. and Taylor, Robert W, "The Computer as a Communication Device," Science and Technology, April, 1968, 21- 31.
11. Marill, Thomas and Roberts, Lawrence G., "Toward a Cooperative Network of Time-Shared Computers," Proceedings of the 1966 Fall Joint Computer Conference, 425-431.
12. Press, L., "The net: progress and opportunity," Communications of the ACM, 35, 12 (December 1992), 21-25.
13. Press, L., "Commercialization of the Internet," Communications of the ACM, Vol 37, No 11, pp 17-21, November, 1994.
14. Press, L., "Developing Networks in Less Industrialized Nations," IEEE Computer, in press.
15. Press, L., "Publishing on the Web," Communications of the ACM, in press.
16. Quarterman, John S., "Preliminary Partial Results of the Second TIC/MIDS Internet Demographic Survey," Matrix News, V. 4, No. 4, December, 1994, pp 1-4, 6.
17. Rickard, Jack, and Funk, Gary, "The International FidoNet -- 22067 Bulletin Boards with an Attitude," Boardwatch, August, 1993, pp 66-80.
18. Ruth, S., Goet, R. "Must invisible colleges be invisible? An approach to examining large communities of network users," Internet Research, 3, 1 (Spring 1993), 47.
19. Williamson, C. and Schneiderman, B., "The Dynamic Home- Finder: Evaluating Dynamic Queries in a Real-Estate Information Exploration System, "Proceedings of the ACM SIGIR '92," Copenhagen, June, 1992, pp. 338-346.
20. Wylie, Margie, "No Place for Women," Digital Media, V. 4, No. 8, January 2, 1995, pp 3-6.
21. -- "Internet global statistics: 1993," Internet Society News, 2, 4 (Winter 1994), 7.
22. --, "Boardwatch-100, Readers' Choice BBS Contest Results," Boardwatch Magazine, September, 993, pp 68-80.
Table 1. Internet Hosts and Users
Capability Hosts Users
provide Internet services 2,515,500 7,790,323
access Internet services 1,011,079 5,709,677
exchange email with the Internet 1,355,744 2,894,216
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Table 2. Global Connectivity: Number of Political Entities
1.Aug.93 15.Feb.94 15.Nov.94
Full IP 57 61 81
Email only 80 75 68
None 99 91 79
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Table 3. Global Growth Rates
3Q94
1.Jul.94 1.Oct.94 Growth
North America 2,172,232 2,678,288 23%
Latin America &
Caribbean 16,619 22,535 36%
Western Europe 730,429 850,993 17%
Eastern Europe &
CIS 27,800 32,951 19%
Middle East 8,871 10,383 17%
Africa 15,595 21,041 35%
Asia 111,278 127,569 15%
South Pacific,
Australia, Antartica 142,353 154,473 9%
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TOTALS 3,225,177 3,898,233 21%
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Table 4. U. S. Cable TV Deployment
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