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Volume 3 , Issue 9
Low cost fibre in the home: something for connectivity fans to chew on
By Jim Carroll
I'm sitting here watching yet another round of commercials from the cable and telephone companies. I continue
to be stunned by the challenges to reality that tend to creep into these advertising campaigns. It's a topic I've
written about before in my Globe & Mail column (which, if you're interested, can be found at
www.jimcarroll.com).
Well, the high-speed battle is kind of interesting, as misleading as some of the marketing pitches might be. And
certainly the Internet becomes a different place when you've got high-speed connectivity in your home. Yet I'm
convinced that cable and ADSL are but a waystation on our march to high-speed connectivity.
I'm convinced that within five or 10 years, I'll have fibre to my home. Real fibre optics. Yottabit connectivity.
Massive amounts of bandwidth that today is only found in the backbones of the largest Internet and telecom
service providers. And I'll have it for an extremely low cost.
It's easy to doubt such a belief; after all, residential fibre optics can seem like a very esoteric technology. Yet,
only 10 years ago, I was using a 2,400 baud modem in my home office, and today I'm blasting through the Net at
400kbs. If you had told me 10 years ago I'd be able to do that, I'd have laughed.
And once we have fibre optics, everything changes. Everything.
There are remarkable things going on in the fibre world that many of us are familiar with, but we might not
necessarily have a firm grasp on the extent of change.
Out in the research labs of organizations like Nortel Networks Corp., they've got things to the point that one
tiny little optical fibre the size of a human hair can carry 15 million phone calls at once. Think about it - one tiny
strand could handle all by itself, every phone call occurring in North America. That boggles my mind.
Not yours? Then consider this: if we took all the telephone calls made in North America in 1998, and tried to get
them through a single fibre using state-of-the-art technology as it existed that year, it would have taken 155,632
years to do so. Do it with the stuff that is now emerging from the research labs, and you can do it in 11 days. I
don't know about you, but numbers like that kind of freak me out.
Still not impressed? Such leading-edge fibre technology would let 360,000 people download the entire Star
Wars - The Phantom Menace movie in one second. (Which kind of makes you realize that the current attempts
by the music industry to deal with the challenges of Napster pale compared to the impossible battle that
Hollywood will be faced with!)
Once we get fibre into the home, everything changes, including the nature of the many other devices in our
home. With high-speed Internet access to the home, radio broadcasting is set to be the next big entertainment
medium to be changed, as a flood of new devices begin to appear on the market.
Consider the Kerbango - the first Internet radio (www.kerbango.com). Plug it into your home stereo, link it to
your home network so that it can access the Net, and you can tune in to any of the tens of thousands of online
radio stations that already exist. The device takes advantage of the fact that there are plenty of people and
organizations that have established their own radio stations online. (Even without a Kerbango, you can access
these stations via any Internet linked personal computer, using software such as WinAmp or RealAudio. Want
to establish your own radio station? Go for it - you simply have to visit a site such as Shoutcast to learn how.)
Kerbango is a true Internet device - and we will see many more things like it. And what it does is change, yet
again, the role of your ISP from a company that supplies an Internet connection, to a company that provides a
broadcast connection.
Which leads to a key point. Today, we think of an ISP as a company that provides access to the Internet from
our homes. Tomorrow, the typical ISP will provide us access, not only to anything, but access anywhere.
Heck, there'll be a specialized ISP who will offer wireless, high speed Internet access from the streets of
DisneyWorld.
What would we do with such a service? Use it for our Internet-linked video camera, of course! Today, you
record family movies or corporate events to a film cassette on your video camera.
Tomorrow? You'll start filming - and the video you take will not only be stored on your tape cassette, but also
be broadcast via the Disney wireless Internet connection to a nearby base station. From there, your video will
be transmitted back to your personal Web site, where it is made available as a live video broadcast. Back home,
grandma and grandpa can tune in as you take the kids on a tour through their optical Internet feed...and if they
miss it, they can tune in at any later time.
Science fiction, you think?
Not really. All of the component parts to do this type of thing exist today. Over on Slashdot, they're talking
about radio technology that already does gigabit-ethernet. The concept isn't far fetched at all.
Stay tuned - with fibre, wireless and Internet devices, our fantastic voyage has barely begun.
Jim Carroll is the co-author of Light Bulbs to Yottabits. How to Profit by Understanding the Internet of the
Future. You can reach him at jcarroll@jimcarroll.com. |
