To a lot of industry watchers, it sounds like promises, promises. For years, consumers have been told that interactive video would revolutionize their TVs and computers, but each attempt to introduce the technology bombed. For example, the interactive television experiments of the early 1990s featured a handful of unpopular programs and services delivered over expensive proprietary systems. All that, however, was before the popularity of the Web, which has become a part of 23 million American households. It boasts services and programming provided not only by big media and information companies but by thousands of small start-ups and even consumers themselves.
Big pipes promise to solve all that.
Right now, most residential users tap into the Web through skinny pipes better known as telephone lines, which channel data at a maximum rate of 56,000 bits a second. That's a trickle compared with the bandwidth of the big pipes, which can push through data up to 200 times faster. Bandwidth measures how much data can pass through a channel. The cable system that runs into the home has tremendous bandwidth. So do satellite-TV signals.