Subtopic: General

High-bandwidth cable connections will link most information appliances to the highway, but some devices will connect wirelessly … When you are on the road and want information from your home or office computer, your portable information appliance will connect to the wireless part of the highway, a switch will connect that to the wired part, and then to the computer/server in your home or office and bring you the information you asked for. There will also be local, less expensive kinds of wireless networks available inside businesses and most homes. These networks will allow you to connect to the highway or your own computer without paying time charges so long as you are within a certain range. Local wireless networks will use technology different from the one used by the wide-area wireless networks. However, portable information devices will automatically select the least expensive network they are able to connect to, so the user won’t be aware of the technological differences. The indoor wireless networks will allow wallet PCs to be used in place of remote controls.

The highway will combine the best qualities of both the telephone and the cable network systems: Like the telephone network, it will offer private connections so that everyone using the network can pursue his or her own interests, on his or her own schedule. It will also be fully two-way like the telephone network, so that rich forms of interaction are possible. Like the cable television network, it will be high-capacity, so there will be sufficient bandwidth to allow multiple televisions or personal computers in a single household to connect simultaneously to different video programs or sources of information.

Hyperlinks on the information highway will let you find answers to your questions when they occur to you and you’re interested. Let’s say you’re watching the news and you see someone you don’t recognize walking with the British prime minister. You want to know who she is. Using your television’s remote control, you will point at the person. That action will bring up a biography and a list of other news accounts in which she figured recently. Point at something on the list, and you will be able to read it or watch it, jumping any number of times from topic to topic and gathering video, audio, and text information from all over the world.

Spatial navigation, which is already being used in some software products, will let you go anywhere the information is by enabling you to interact with a visual model of a real or make-believe world. You can think of such a model as a map – an illustrated, three-dimensional table of contents. Spatial navigation will be particularly important for interacting with televisions and small, portable PCs, which are unlikely to have conventional keyboards. To do some banking, you might go to a drawing of a main street, then point, using a mouse of a remote control or even your finger, at the drawing of a bank … You’ll be able to jump into the map so you can navigate down a street of through the rooms of a building. You’ll be able to zoom in and out and pan around to different locations very easily.