Pacific Bell, for example, the worst- affected phone company, was simultaneously offering cut rates on installing second home telephone lines, with an offer of five months' free Internet access thrown in. Similar schizophrenia seems to be repeated in telephone companies around the world. But telephone companies live in what they must think are strange and disturbing times, as country after country sheds its regulated telephone monopoly in favor of new competition. Meanwhile, direct satellite services are talking about using some of their spare capacity to broadcast the most popular Web sites, a few electric companies are experimenting with delivering entertainment and information services, the privately financed Britain-Japan fiber optic cable is challenging the phone companies' traditional hegemony over the telecommunications infrastructure, and wireless networks are the most likely telecommunications future for Third World countries where building the kind of wired telecommunications infrastructure we take for granted in the West is too expensive. It doesn't help that there is a fundamental difference of approach between the telephone networks and the Internet.
Telephone networks are circuit-switched.
When you place a call, you open a two-way circuit to the person you're calling, and that circuit belongs to you until the call is finished. In a human conversation, as MIT Media Lab director and Wired columnist Nicholas Negroponte likes to say, silence is meaningful. The Internet, however, is a packet-switched network. Any data that gets sent, whether voice, text, or full-motion video, gets divided up into little packets that take any available route to their destination, where they are reassembled into the original message. At the FCC Bandwidth Forum, Love raised another point having to do with the number of people who can be connected at any one time.