In all likelihood what will happen, and what we think ought to happen [is that government will provide funds to schoools] to buy access the same way you buy a telephone line. It will take 20 years to wire the whole country with fiber, and you could do this very soon.
It is an investment that will grow and weave itself into our homes and businesses, becoming part of the fabric of the nation’s economy and everyday life as much as the telephone is today. Beause of this tight bonding, the NII would be definitely “ours,” assuming the United States is the first to set one up; other countries would have difficulty exploiting it for their own competitive advantage the way they have so many other technologies that originated in the United States.
The NII would not eliminate today’s vendors of information. Rather, it would offer these businesses a larger market, modify somewhat their roles, and create a richer, more competitive environment.
The information superhighway is going to grow up just like the Internet grew up, as a series of small disconnected networks that eventually interface and interoperate with one another. The future of the information superstructure is going to be based on the Internet and a suite of private value-added networks. You’ll see regional installations and private companies with their own internal networks forming the new network.
The superhighway’s adoption curve actually will be more rapid than any technology we’ve seen before.
Traced in the phosphors glowing on the screen of his computer, Robert E. Kahn sees the 21st century: Hair-thin strands of glass fiber are threaded through computerized libraries to supercomputers, large high-resolution video screens and hundreds of thousands of computer work stations located throughout the country … Such a national network – an information infrastructure … much like a national highway system for data – would make it possible to ship enormous amounts of information back and forth at what are called gigabit speeds (billions of bits of data per second), almost a thousand times faster than anyone using today’s fastest electronic networks.
Online services will coexist with print for the foreseeable future and maybe forever … It isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition we are facing.
The highway, using fiber optics, may someday carry a wide range of computer information and advanced television services to businesses, research centers, schools and homes. Many technology experts argue that such a network is vital if the country is to remain competitive in the next century.
General-purpose users may eventually outnumber the computer experts who now dominate the system, and they are gaining access in rapid numbers.
With the ability to mix sound, text and video, newspapers and TV news programs would evolve into richer, multimedia presentations.