When the giant Bell Telephone monopoly was broken up, other companies started putting up their own wires, but they were still telephone companies. But that's likely to change drastically in the next few years. This means that all of us whose homes are wired for cable are ready for the next stage in the development of electronic communications, like it or not. We won't have to do anything except sign on the dotted line when the cable company comes knocking. The revolution will come to us.
Cable is ideal for the next generation of telephone service.
That's technospeak for the kind of elbow room that signals need when they're hustling along a wire or speeding through the air. Regular phone lines have very little bandwidth. They're putting in higher-bandwidth lines that can carry voice signals and such things as still pictures and computer chatter at the same time. This won't do any good, of course, unless local telephone companies do the same thing. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, so the only way that this improved telephone wire will do any good is for all of us to have it, all the way to the handset.