In 2020, people will look back and be mighty annoyed by our profligate insistence on wiring a fiber-coax hybrid to the home rather than swallowing the cost of an all-fiber solution … This is one of the few benefits of a government-owned monopoly: Italy will have a far better multimedia telecommunications system than the United States by 2000.
Predictor: Negroponte, Nicholas
Prediction, in context:In a 1995 article for Wired magazine, Nicholas Negroponte, founder of MIT’s Media Lab, writes: ”In 2020, people will look back and be mighty annoyed by our profligate insistence on wiring a fiber-coax hybrid to the home rather than swallowing the cost of an all-fiber solution. They’ll ask, ‘Why didn’t our parents and grandparents plan more effectively for the future?’ As far as the American home is concerned, the phone companies have the right architecture (switched services), and the cable companies have the right bandwidth (broadband services). We need the union of these: switched broadband services. But how do we get from here to there? No one will deny that the long-term solution is to install fiber all the way, but the benefits seem diffuse and the costs acute. In the eyes of the telcos and cable companies, the question is financial – and since the near-term balance sheets don’t add up, fiber is not being laid all the way. One way around this problem is to circumvent the private market and let a telecommunications monopoly build the infrastructure, which is exactly what Telecom Italia is doing. It has declared fiber to the home as its goal and will swallow the initial cost meeting this goal in the name of national interest. This is one of the few benefits of a government-owned monopoly: Italy will have a far better multimedia telecommunications system than the United States by 2000.”
Biography:Nicholas Negroponte, a co-founder of MIT’s Media Lab and a popular speaker and writer about technologies of the future, wrote one of the 1990s’ best-selling books about the new future of communications, “Being Digital.” (Pioneer/Originator.)
Date of prediction: January 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: Information Infrastructure
Subtopic: Pipeline/Switching/Hardware
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: 2020: The Fiber-Coax Legacy – What We See in the Current Fiber-Coax Strategies is Fiscal Timidity, Justified by the Usage Patterns of an Old-Line Broadcast and Publishing Model, Not the Net
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.10/negroponte_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney