Interesting People mailing list archives
hope springs eternal
From: David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>
Date: Sun, 14 Nov 1993 11:12:15 -0500
From: brpinc () access digex net (BRP Publications) Newsgroups: alt.politics.datahighway Subject: Interview with Ray Smith Date: 10 Nov 1993 16:47:44 -0500 As I wrote yesterday, I did an interview with Bell Atlantic Chairman Raymond Smith a few weeks ago. I only had a few minutes with him, but I was able to get him to describe his vision of a future information highway. Since he's the one most likely to build it (not the Clinton Administration or any gubmint agency) perhaps we should center on his views rather than on some concocted fear about gubmint control on the flow of information. Frankly, we have recourse when gubmint infringes on our right to speak in a public forum, while we do not while using a commercial online service (go to Prodigy and do the George Carlin 7 dirty word test if you think I'm wrong). The Info Highway WILL BE COMMERCIAL. Ray Smith's vision is fairly benign, however. The one thing he did say that alarmed me is that he will run the servers as "jukeboxes". Only Bell Atlantic's jukeboxes will charge you to put content up AND to take it off. On the bright side, they will provide a "telephony" model, which means that anybody will be able to provide content...anyway here's the scoop. Shortly before testifying before Sen. Howard M. Metzenbaum's Judi- ciary subcommittee Oct. 27. Bell Atlantic Corp.'s Chairman Raymond W. Smith met with reporters for a preview of the company's Stargazer video-on-demand menuing system and to answer questions about the regional Bell operating company's proposed merger with Tele-Communications Inc. Information and Interactive Services Report: "How relevant are the charges that owning the network and owning programming creates and anticompetitive atmosphere for interactive en- tertainment networks? Are information providers going to be blocked out?" Raymond Smith: "Do those who own it and provide content have a pre- ferred position? Well that was a model of a cable system that had 30 channels and there was only one in each town--when there was limited capacity. We're going to offer virtually unlimited shelf space. Anybody who has a product--we'll rent you shelf space and we'll deliver it to the home. If the homes buy it--you've got a product. We'll do it regionally, we'll do it national, we'll do it city by city and we hope that there are not 50 applications for the network, but 10,000 applications for the network." IISR: "So, do you think that the 500-channel cable system is a misnomer-- the wrong idea?" RS: "Yes. It's the infinite channel. We won't be talking about channels in the year 2,000. That will be sort of quaint. That will be a "do you remember when..." IISR: "That sounds like a telco (telephone company) model." RS: "It is a telco model. All of this will be telco. Only it will be broad-band, interactive telco. Not narrowband telco. It will be switched, we will be delivering it exactly to your home. It will be common carrier when it starts from the telephone plant and it will be sort of mini common carrier as the cable act suggests for cable companies." IISR: "Which side do you think will be easier to build?" RS: "We're about to find out. We're doing it with telephone in Alexan- dria (Va.), and in Tom's River, N.J. and in Morris County, N.J. We're actually building it. You can go there and see it coming in and being delivered to the houses. We're doing it with compressed copper, with ADSL (asynchronous digital subscriber line) we're doing it with Broad- band Technologies, which is fiber with coax on the end, and we're going to do it with fiber all of the way into the home. So, we're in the early stages of determining what is the best architecture. We know that it will be server-based, it will be digital, it will be broadband, switched and interactive. those things we know for sure. You can start modelling and doing business plans and you get very excited about this. The market studies are absolutely dynamite. But it's going to take three or four years. In 1993 we have a few hundred people that are on a very rudimentary video-on-demand [system] over ADSL here in Northern Virginia. Next year we'll have that in the tens of thousands in Morris County and in Alexandria. In the following year it will be well above 100,000. So it will not really be until 1996 or 1997 that we start to get into the millions, but by that time we'll know exactly what all of the services will be. We'll have the operating software--which does not exist today--well have the set-tops. Clearly, we're talking to companies such as Microsoft and General Instru- ments and Scientific Atlanta and Broadband Technologies and IBM and DEC--all of those companies that will build the servers, that will build the broadband transport, that will build the set-tops, that will build the user interface. [Pointing to a demonstration of the Stargazer user interface] That "mall" kind of thing. That won't be the only one, and it won't even look like that when it's finished. There will a Stargazer, but it will be a very jolly easy-to-get through interface. "If you think of this, this is a rather elegant and complicated engi- neering problem. You're going to have to have various ways to distribute this broadband interactive stuff. Each one of the technologies fits certain circumstances. ADSL is good because you don't have to put up any plant and where you have demand for the service but you don't have a high penetration. Say you have a demand for the service, but it's only 10 per- cent of a particular community. Well, do you abandon that community or do you build the whole plant? That's where ADSL comes in, because ADSL is house by house. You don't equip ADSL for a whole communi- ty, you equip it house by house by putting in a circuit board. When that community gets up to about 20 percent or looks like it's on its way to 30 percent penetration, you start to build fiber out and you use other tech- nologies and you take those boards out and you take them to another network. It's fungible, it's transportable. That's why it's good. When people say it's interim, well it's interim but we'll still be using that technology at 6 megabits, which is a super-duper HDTV signal, 15 years from now. "Only 60 percent of houses [subscribe to] cable today, and only 80 percent can get it. We'll be able to deliver it anywhere there's a tele- phone line. And the 6 megabit is the one for 1995. Those contracts are being reviewed right now and they'll build out that system." -----end. So this is the guy who's likely to build and operate the highway--he doesn't sound too bad, does he? I can tell you one thing, however, it's not going to be your father's Internet. Nate Zelnick, Associtae Editor, IISR
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