Chapter 5: Paths to the Highway

When you send a message across the information highway it will be “signed” by your computer or other information appliance with a digital signature that only you are capable of applying, and it will be encrypted so that only the intended recipient will be able to decipher it. You’ll send a message, which could be information of any kind, including voice, video, or digital money. The recipient will be able to be almost positive that the message is really from you, that it was sent at exactly the indicated time, that it has not been tampered with in the slightest, and that others cannot decipher it.

Chapter 5: Paths to the Highway

Past wars have been won or lost because the most powerful governments on earth didn’t have the cryptological power any interested junior high school students with a personal computer can harness today. Soon any child old enough to use a computer will be able to transmit encoded messages that no government on earth will find easy to decipher. This is one of the profound implications of the spread of fantastic computer power.

Chapter 5: Paths to the Highway

Wireless service poses obvious concerns about privacy and security, because radio signals can easily be intercepted. Even wired networks can be tapped. The highway software will have to encrypt transmission to avoid eavesdropping.

Chapter 5: Paths to the Highway

Cable and phone companies around the world will progress along four parallel paths. First, each will be going after the others’ business. Cable companies will offer telephone service, and phone companies will offer video services, including television. Second, both systems will be providing better ways to connect PCs with either ISDN or cable modems. Third, both will be converting to digital technology in order to provide more television channels and higher quality signals. Fourth, both will be conducting trials of broadband systems connected to television sets and PCs. Each of the four strategies will motivate investment in digital network capacity. There will be intense competition between telephone companies and cable television networks to be the first network in a neighborhood.

Chapter 5: Paths to the Highway

Over the next few years the Internet will improve and provide easy access, wide availability, a consistent user interface, easy navigation, and integration with other commercial on-line services … Full audio and video support will require significant changes in the network and probably won’t be available for several years. When these changes do happen, they will set up the Internet in direct competition with the phone companies’ voice networks. Their different pricing approaches will make the competition interesting to watch.

Chapter 5: Paths to the Highway

The Internet is a wonderful, critical development and a very clear element of the final system, but it will change significantly in the years ahead. The current Internet lacks security and needs a billing system. Much of the Internet culture will seem as quaint to future users of the information highway as stories of wagon trains and pioneers on the Oregon Trail do to us today … In fact, the Internet of today is not the Internet of even a short time ago. The pace of its evolution is so rapid that a description of the Internet as it existed a year or even six months ago might be seriously out-of-date.

Chapter 5: Paths to the Highway

Today’s estimates put the cost at about $1,200, give or take a couple of hundred dollars, depending on architecture and equipment choices, to connect one information appliance (such as a TV or a PC) in each home to the highway. This price includes running the fiber to every neighborhood, the servers, the switches and electronics in the home. With roughly 100 million homes in the United States, this works out to around $120 billion of investment in one country alone. Nobody is going to spend this kind of money until it is clear that the technology really works and that consumers will pay enough for the new applications. The fees customers will pay for television service, including video-on-demand, won’t pay for building the highway. To finance construction, investors will have to believe new services will generate almost as much revenue again as cable television does today.

Chapter 5: Paths to the Highway

The full highway is unlikely to be available in homes for at least a decade … Constructing the highway will be a big job. It will require the installation of not only physical infrastructure, such as fiber-optic cable and high-speed switches and servers, but also the development of software platforms … The same sort of competition that took place within the PC industry during the 1980s is taking place now to create the software components that will constitute the information highway platform. The software that runs the highway will have to offer great navigation and security, electronic-mail and bulletin board capabilities, connection to competing software components, and billing and account services.