Through phone lines, TV sets surf the World Wide Web and send and receive electronic mail. Two developments are pushing convergence forward. One is economies of scale. Tim Kelly, an analyst with the International Telecommunication Union in Switzerland, points out that a lot of things we believe are new are actually old technologies that are now finding mass-market applications. Videophones were first tested in the 1960s, the Internet began in 1969, and satellite phones have been used since the 1970s.
More usage leads to higher economies of scale, making telecom technologies cheaper still.
More than 120 years after Alexander Graham Bell invented it, the phone is finally being transformed into something more than two terminals connected by a copper wire. The other factor is the advent of fiber-optic cable. For a long time, the telephone's key limitation was the copper wire, which can carry only one voice or data transmission at one time. Fiber optics, which are filaments of glass twined into strands, can simultaneously transmit and receive hundreds of messages and services. Countless companies around the world are busy developing other such broadband services.