It's an overcast Sunday afternoon. Your favorite NFL team is on a bye week and the thought of studying turns your stomach, so you microwave a bag of popcorn, pop open a can of your favorite libation ... and then turn on the computer and click on a movie icon.
A scene from the Starship Enterprise circa 2075? No, it's more like a scene that is becoming more typical in American homes in the year 2001 through the miracle of broadband technology. The Center for Digital Democracy defines broadband as \high-speed Internet connections that allow for transfers of information at rates far faster than those of dial-up modems.""
Content encoders convert audio and video into digital format and post them on the Internet for downloading. However, a typical dial-up connection can only transmit this data at an average of 48 kilobits per second (this average falling to as low as 14 kb/s during periods of high activity, most noticeably during U.S. business hours and prime time), creating long pauses in transmission (buffering) and a slideshow experience when viewing streaming video.
Broadband is designed to eliminate the ""world-wide wait"" and allow for transmission at speeds of up to 7.1 Mb/s. The two most common types of broadband connections are digital subscriber line and cable modems. DSL utilizes frequencies outside the normal voice range on standard telephone lines. The line is connected to a DSL modem either inside or outside the computer. It requires special filters to be installed on all other extensions on the line, but users can be on the telephone and the Internet at the same time.
Cable modems use the same wiring that transmits cable TV and allow subscribers to watch cable on their televisions and access the Internet at blazing speeds at the same time through an external modem. Charter Communications' Charter@Home service falls into this category.
Broadband allows Web pages to pop up in seconds and near-VHS quality streaming video to play on your desktop. The technology behind broadband has actually been around since the 1950s, but FCC regulations kept it restricted for use in cable TV services.
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 and financial backing from telecommunications giants such as AT&T changed all this, allowing for cable companies such as Charter to offer both cable and high-speed Internet services using the same wiring. The first broadband services were activated in 1998 with 1.5 million subscribers a year later. According to the Yankee Group, a telecommunication research organization, this number is projected to soar to 35 million by 2005 in the United States alone.
UW-Madison students are divided on their perceptions of this technology. Some, like Mitchell Hamberger, laud high-speed services for their convenience.
""[I'm] able to be online 24 hours a day with no dial-up connections or signal loss because of dropped connections,"" Hamberger said.
Others, like disgruntled Charter customer Phil Ejercito find that negative provider experiences seriously detract from their enjoyment of the technology.
""The greatest drawback to subscribing to Charter@Home is the company's utter incompetence and false advertising [and] promises,"" he said. ""They missed six installation appointments with me. ... in less than one month, I had spent three-and-a-half hours on hold with their customer service. They advertise blazing fast speeds and no disconnections, however, they don't tell their customers that they cap their upload speeds and that they are indeed subject to extended disconnections with no notice.""
While UW-Madison researchers are currently not involved with any projects directly relating to broadband, a number of individuals, including those connected with the SWORD (Scalable Wide-area On-demand Reliable Delivery) Project, are working toward the improvement of an important facet of broadband's future: streaming media. Among the innovations they have developed are hierarchical stream merging multicast tools for real-time streaming. These allow a smoother and more efficient stream with little or no buffering due to the fact that the server bandwidth is expanding logarithmically in correlation with the client's connection.
Broadband's future lies in the implementation of new streaming media services, such as interactive television, which is expected to have 40 million subscribers by the year 2004. Currently, devices such as Dazzle allow users to display video images on a monitor while using other programs, but ITV will expand on this by enabling viewers to click on sections of the screen to access a Web page or other information source. For example, users could get product information during commercial breaks (a feature that is causing some advertisers to squirm with anticipation).
So, despite providers' shortcomings, broadband technologies are reshaping the way we look at the Internet due to its always-on capability and transmission speed. Its continued expansion and development will help contribute to making the Internet an everyday part of everyone's life, with greater convenience than ever before.
