The prediction, in brief:

One contender, the Gigabit Testbed Initiative, envisions billion-bit-per-second wires. Ways to connect and manage such capacity are now being tested at five sites across the country. Or the signals could be carried by phone lines or TV cables. But there’s a dark horse. Utilities are thinking of installing “information pipes” into homes to carry electronic signals that would control peak power demand.

Predictor: Cerf, Vinton G.

Prediction, in context:

In a 1995 article for Newsweek magazine, Sharon Begley and Adam Rogers quote Vinton Cerf. They write:”What do people want? Services like voice and audio – the Internet delivers them only slightly faster than snailmail. To provide this, the Netxtnet – actually, it’s unamed so far, but Gigabit and MBone and National Information Infrastructure (NII) are in the running, and you can guess which snappy label is the government’s – would have info pipelines whose bandwidth swamps today’s standard phone lines. One contender, the Gigabit Testbed Initiative, envisions billion-bit-per-second wires. Ways to connect and manage such capacity are now being tested at five sites across the country. Or the signals could be carried by phone lines or TV cables. But there’s a dark horse. Utilities are thinking of installing ‘information pipes’ into homes to carry electronic signals that would control peak power demand (users wouldn’t notice the slight brownouts). ‘They might just as well put in high-capacity telecommunications fiber, because they could charge for services on it,’ says Vint Cerf.”

Date of prediction: February 1, 1995

Topic of prediction: Information Infrastructure

Subtopic: Pipeline/Switching/Hardware

Name of publication: Newsweek

Title, headline, chapter name: MBones and Giganets: What Will Replace the Internet?

Quote Type: Partial quote

Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/document?%20m=a02afd22778df975b9d08447fcdbb115&%20docnum=1&wchp=dGLbVzb-1S1zV&%20md5=92599ec03d9870741b186ad102a9732d9

This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Vellucci, Amanda