Public Power

for today's wired world

continued...

Then there was television. The demand for over the air TV signal, the limitation in available channels, and the signals weakening over distance or through hills and mountains created a need to put a sensitive antennae on high spots to collect the signal and then devices to strengthen the resulting analog signal and send it over a specialized wire called co-axial cable (coax) to the consumers. The phone company copper wire was unusable for the transmission of TV signal. This meant coax joined the telephone wires on the poles in almost all cities and most villages. Because it was expensive to string all that coax, functional monopolies called franchises were authorized by state legislatures and granted by municipalities. Technically most of the franchises were non-exclusive, but practically they were exclusive because the economics made it unfeasible for a competitor to run another set of coax. At some point, the load limits of the poles and density of wire in the public rights of way also came into consideration.

 

So far so good, but the necessities of the cold war and its cessation unleashed a powerful new force in communications. Within 10 years after the end of the cold war, the Internet erupted all over the world and a mad dash was on to use it. It was the “Internet” where information of all types (voice, video, data) could be encoded as zeros and ones and placed in packets and sent at the speed of light to points on a seamless web engulfing the world, a world wide web. It was readily apparent that the best way to send Internet signal and reap its full potential was as light pulses over “fiber” optic cable, tiny hair-like strands of glass capable of carrying enormous amounts of data over long distances. Fiber is capable of commonly handing transmissions at a billion (1,000,000,000) flashes per second or more. Tetra bit (1,000,000,000,000 flashes per second) transmissions may be on the horizon and may actually be necessary for the distribution of such futuristic things as holo-experiences, 3 dimensional holographic movies involving all 5 senses. The holy grail of the information age became Fiber To The Door (FTTD). However, fiber was very expensive. It also meant stringing the fiber on the polls or burying it in right of ways. While fiber was successfully deployed for long haul purposes, its deployment to the consumer premises remains a different story.

 

As Internet burst upon the scene, plain old telephone service was first retrofitted with dial up modems that did a good job for basic Internet, but the increased capacity of computers and the public demand to send more and more content over the Internet set the life span of “dial-up” at 5 to 15 years. Under the best of conditions, “dial-up” capacity topped out at 56,000 bits (offs and ons per second - abbreviated as 56 kilo bits per second or 56kbps). It generally takes 8 bits to represent one letter of text. Those 8 bits are called a Byte, denoted in abbreviations as a big “B” as compared to bit with a little “b”. 56kpbs is roughly 7kBs, roughly 7,000 letters a second. Dial-up was doomed to be replaced by something capable of turning on and off faster than 56,000 times a second.


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