Don't Miss This--PCW's Exclusive Four-Part Series: Broadband Innovations

When electricity was first discovered, no one foresaw that it would be used to power artificial hearts, electric guitars, disco balls or computers.

Now the same thing is happening with the Internet.

When the Internet was first invented in the 1970s it was intended to be a means of transporting information.

"The Internet was meant to carry little pieces of data from one place to another. End of story," says Vint Cerf, co-father of the Internet and Vice President of Google.

Like most of us, he never anticipated that a refrigerator would become an Internet appliance, nor did he foresee the Internet-enabled picture frame.

And while it has enabled the creation of thousands of cool gadgets, the Internet also is transforming the way we live, work, and learn.

When I arrived in Silicon Valley for the first time earlier this year, I was shocked at the poor state of the telecommunications infrastructure.

I'm a visiting reporter covering global developments in broadband for PC World.

In a region renowned as the technology hub of the world, broadband speeds to residents are at best ten percent of what is available in markets such as Japan, Korea and Northern Europe (not to mention my frustrations over the number of dropped calls and terrible cell phone coverage--but that's a different story).

It made me question whether Silicon Valley would be able to maintain its lead as a center for innovation.

Although I still argue that access to decent broadband speeds shouldn't have to be such a rare commodity in this part of the world, I have come to realize that in the end, it's more about the people. Find creative individuals who do their best to exhaust the possibilities of whatever technology is available to them and you'll find innovation.

My search for such individuals, and the amazing people I found, is what motivated me to tell their stories in this series.

What's in the Series

Today's story, called The 21st Century Athlete, focuses on Patrick O'Day, a gamer hoping to make it to the international Digital Games in China this fall.

Tomorrow, in the slideshow Fiber Optics Comes to the Tipi, I tell the story of how the Ktunaxa Nation of Canada uses broadband to save their language and culture from extinction. Don't miss the photo of Leo Williams, one of the last speakers of their language.

Next, in The Film Editor's Dream, I introduce an internationally acclaimed film editor, whose 10 gigabit per second fiber-optic connection is making it possible for him to work with remote film editing in real-time--all while living in a rural community in Sweden.

Finally, in The Doctor Isn't In But Can Still See You, I tell the story of how broadband has changed the way America gets well by facilitating remote drug access and transforming health care in prisons and rural communities.

And there are hundreds of other stories to tell. Keep reading, and I'll give you the highlights of a few more.

Critical-Care Training@Home

The ability to get an education remotely, and in many cases, free of charge, has created new opportunities for people all over the world. Many prestigious universities, like MIT, offer access to teaching material on-line. However, in most cases, in order to actually get your degree, you'll have to pay tuition. But there are exceptions.

Through online courses at universities in countries where education is free, you can get the real thing for free. The trick becomes finding courses offered in English. One example is the University of Gavle in Sweden offering an on-line MBA program in Marketing Management free of charge in English. And as broadband speeds of 100 megabits per second are becoming common in most European and Asian countries, distance education is entering a whole new ballpark.

Through interactive 3D experiences and visual-simulation software, companies like EON Reality have developed training where for example critical-care nurses and coal miners can simulate "hands-on" experience.

"It allows for training in high-risk environments. In the virtual world, people can make mistakes that in real life would be fatal or very costly" says Jamie Justice, Director of Visualized Learning and Innovation at the Kentucky Community and Technical College System (KCTCS).

Citizen Science

For years, the Internet has made it possible to let scientists tap the unused capacity of PCs all over the world to create virtual supercomputers that can chew away at different humanitarian problems including everything from finding a cure to cancer to creating more nutritious rice.

Recently, the University of Washington made it possible for members of the public to become more active contributors to science and research as they launched the computer game Foldit.

The online game is about folding 3D proteins in the best possible way. Proteins play a part in many of our most common diseases such as HIV, cancer and Alzheimer's. Through competitive play, the goal is to have people design new proteins that could potentially prevent or treat diseases.

Another example is SETI@home, a scientific initiative leveraging the power of Internet-connected computers to analyze radio telescope data in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI).

Civic Services

Broadband has made it easier for members of the public to be part of the democracy process. Watching online video recordings of public hearings, testifying remotely, or easy access to all sorts of governmental documents like budgets or policies, are some examples. Broadband has also improved public safety in a number of ways.

The City of Anaheim has developed a portal called Enterprise Virtual Operations Center (EVOC) that functions as a joint virtual command center for police, fire departments, and other frontline personnel. Traditionally these departments have been organized as separate entities with separate systems, making collaboration difficult and delaying crisis response.

"This is one way we've found of using broadband to help us do our job", says Tom Wood, Anaheim Assistant City Manager."It allows us to take existing info and present it simultaneously to frontline personnel allowing them to do their job more intelligently."

Video Is Killing Your Broadband Connections

In recent years, people have gone from using the Internet to set up physical meetings through online dating services, to actually spending time together in virtual worlds.

User-generated video, online games, high quality video conferencing, and peer-to-peer services for video downloads, are the most bandwidth-requiring services commonly used today, according to a consumer survey conducted by RVA Market Research & Consulting.

In the future, high-definition television services are likely to be the main drivers for increased broadband speeds, the RVA survey, along with most experts, predict. Television viewing flexibility, convergence between TV, Internet and telephone, and better quality through higher resolutions, are expected to push the demand for speed.

Using the Internet to stream high bit rate, uncompressed 1080p content, the best TV quality now available, requires broadband speeds of 3Gbit/sec. Compressed, it requires between 50 to 250Mbit/sec, speeds that America's meager broadband networks are nowhere near able to cope with.

Transmissions at the Speed of Light

As opposed to the copper cables of telephones and television wires, fiber-optic cables convey information in the form of hyper-quick laser pulses. Consumers hooked up with fiber-optic communication can get speeds up to 1000 times faster than standard DSL and cable networks. The future promises even more.
In recent experiments, broadband rates of up to 14,000 Gbps have been reached over a single fiber.

The Dutch consulting group M&I Partners offers a speed test that demonstrates the difference in speed between traditional communication connections (modem and DSL) and fiber connections of 10 Megabits, 100 Megabits and 1 Gigabit per second. According to their test, downloading a DVD film on dial-up modem takes more than 11 days, compared to just over 50 seconds on a 1-gigabit fiber connection.

Although most services currently available don't require these lightning-quick speeds, fiber is the only platform able to support next-generation services such as two-way high-definition television.

Much of Asia and Europe has already begun to replace their old copper cable and telephony infrastructure with fiber optics. Higher population density and more government involvement have accelerated the transition in these regions. However, in the U.S., where fiber deployment has been left to the open market, finding functioning business models remains a challenge.

This is hurting the competitive position of the U.S. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), America has dropped from 4th to 15th place in the world when it comes to broadband penetration since 2001. The International Telecommunications Union's digital opportunity index which considers price and capacity shows even worse ratings with the U.S. coming in at 21st place. Broadband subscribers in the U.S. pay twice as much as their Asian or European counterparts for one-twentieth the speed.

As far as the Internet's growth is concerned, space is now the final frontier. The Internet is expanding its reach across the solar system as Vint Cerf and his team are in the midst of developing a new set of protocols that will work across inter-planetary distances--all to ensure reliable communication between the ever growing number of devices being launched into space.

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