Date: Fri, 02 Oct 1992  20:44:04 EDT
From: FZC@CU.NIH.GOV
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Comments on the Multimedia Article
Reply-To: TDARCOS@MCIMAIL.COM
Organization: TELECOM Digest
X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu
X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu
X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 12, Issue 756, Message 2 of 8

> to study jointly the technological barriers that continue to
> block such services

  People want low-cost means of communicating.  BBS systems grew for
the same reason mushrooms do: the territory is fertile.  Calling BBSs
can be quite fun and running one can be exciting.  The services have
to be special to get people to pay for them, and the demand has to be
there.  Charge people more than alternatives or provide worse service
and you might as well not offer the facility in the first place.

> to examine what types of services Americans want and how much they
> are willing to pay for them."

First figure out what you are going to offer, discover how much it
will cost, then offer the services and drop that which is uneconomic.
Some things that I know there is a demand for can be gotten into
inexpensively, such as internet mail, telnet, FTP, reduced cost
long-distance data services for networks to transfer mail,
commercialization of the internet backbone, and cheaper means for
people to call long distance BBSs.  It doesn't take a whole lot (for a
large telecommunications company) to offer these services, just
patience like the mushroom factor: you plant the seeds and you have to
wait for them to grow.  But it will take time to see what will work
and what won't.  And you have to go with the flow of the market.
Shoving something down people's throats won't work even if it is
superior technology, and it definitely won't work if it isn't.

> TV sets, computers and telephones would merge into one unit
> that might be connected to the electronic services by a fiber-
> optic cable into the home."

The problem we have is that we have copper wire (or that cheap
substitute I can't remember the name for, DXC, DGC or something) which
can't handle large bandwidth.  When people switched from outhouses to
indoor plumbing, they had to rip holes in their houses to accomodate.

The simple fact is that if we continue as an industrial and
information-driven society, there will be higher demand for more
bandwidth.  If communications companies are going to make money
servicing this demand, the only answer we have is to tear out the
wires and put fiber in.  We will buy the capacity as we want it.  Just
have the capacity there and have it low enough cost to allow anyone
who can afford a phone now to get in on this stuff.

Note to anyone working for a telephone company: Do us all a favor and
oversupply capacity!  You should build for a factor of one hundred
times current capacity, the equivalent of running a small PBX into
each house.  I believe that 10 fiber optic (FO) cables are the size of
one twisted pair, and one FO cable is the equivalent of something like
5,000 phone lines or 20 tv channels.  Figure sending 1/2 of the
capacity of a FO cable per house, and you can expect to cover the
bandwidth demands of the future and several years from now.  You can't
go wrong overestimating capacity; if one party doesn't use it, someone
else will.

> Individuals would "interact" with the system by pressing buttons on
> a hand-held control device.

Or create decent menus and make the response {fast}.  The worst thing
about Prodigy is not the ads, nor their censoring mail, nor all the
other things they've done.  It's their torturously slow response time
and painfully inadequate menuing system.  I've seen cheap BBS systems
that had better traversing capability.

> Many feel that for the market to take off, the country must have
> a new communications network capable of opening a video circuit
> between any given point and another -- just as today's telephone
> network does for calls.

"Video Dial Tone".  You can get it now, it's just too expensive.  What
we need to do is either increase the bandwidth of the individual users
or of major corporate users.  If the ability to do this becomes
available, it will be because someone figured out that they could make
money by selling part of the bandwidth.

Question: Is being able to call someone from New York to Los Angeles
in full color full motion video (FCFMV) worth $1 a minute?  Yes; the
demand at that price would overwhelm capacity.  Is it worth $20 a
minute?  Depends on who is buying.  Current rates are about $30 a
minute if I remember correctly ($1800 an hour, three hour minimum,
plus setup and teardown charge).  Bring the price down to $5 a minute
and a ten minute call could save $500 in plane fees.  Bring the price
down to $1 a minute and anyone can use it.  Let's stop thinking in
terms of what people use the space for and instead simply allocate
them a block of frequency.  If they buy 6MHZ space, they can do FCFMV
or they can transmit 500 simultaneous telephone calls.  What is
expensive is the switching equipment.  But it can be done.

I'll give someone a very valuable hint.  In New York, travel is almost
impossible by roads.  There is a place where you could sell local
FCFMV telephone calls at $1 a minute.  Charge someone $300 to install
his line on a finance basis, say over a ten month period.  Charge $100
a month for the service.  If he uses it on a regular basis, it's more
productive than trying to schedule meetings he can't get through the
city to do.  Toss in three additional phone-size channels with it, so
he can have a separate phone line for a conference call and a fax
machine running both ways.  As there is more demand, the volume will
allow you to provide the service for less and still make money at it.

At first it'll be like a toy as advertising agencies and large
companies sign up for it.  Make a promise of at least 1,000 customers
signed up before the customer has to pay anything.  Make it an
alternative to local dial tone since you can also allow him to connect
into the phone lines too if the call is off-network to a voice line.

> Highly complex software also will be needed to control and
> manage new networks capable of carrying large amounts of digital
> data.

I believe this to be true; it therefore behooves all of us that the
systems be done small and simple; it makes failures less dangerous.

> Telephone companies such as GTE Corp. already are conducting
> experiments with early versions of "video on demand."

"Is there something wrong with this picture?"  :)

> Regan said the consortium hopes to create common technical
> standards to make for ease of use by customers.  But questions
> remain about whether Americans will want these services.

To reuse an overworked quote from a movie I've never seen, "If you
build it, they will come."  If the capacity is there, people will find
ways to use it that the inventors would never even dream of.  When the
PC had only 64K, a 640K limit was huge and unreachable.  Today,
they're talking about 64 MEG of memory for some machines.

> Many Americans are still intimidated by computers, but optimists
> note that companies such as CompuServe and Prodigy have made
> inroads into American homes by providing on-line information
> services.

Compu$erve charges an arm and a leg and Prodigy has so many problems
that it's no more fun bashing it because it's problems are so well
known that you can't surprise anyone.

> Kodak views an interactive communications system as a way to
> send photos around the country.

When people were buying video cameras, Kodak was {still} working on
still photography.  They essentially all but gave away the 35MM market
and now they're trying to catch up, with 1940s ideas.

*This* is the reason these systems fail: Overpriced and underpowered.
We need new ideas and we need to think of new ways to use the
technology and the capacity we have.  We did not, when steel was
invented, build metal copies of wooden bridges; we have new
technology, we need new ideas.


Paul Robinson
These are my opinions, no one else is responsible for them.