Every Saturday three newspapers get dumped in my driveway. Together they contain at least 10 million words and cost about $4. To download that from the Internet, if it were available, it would take nearly 24 hours and cost _ depending on your provider _ anything up to $500. That is presuming you have $3000 worth of computer gear. Re the information superhighway, perhaps it is time to take a Bex and have a good lie down. The Internet is regarded as the precursor for the information superhighway that is _ we are told _ going to change our lives. There are about 5480 million non-users of the Internet throughout the world and about 17,950,000 non-users in Australia. Some of these may be wondering what the fuss is about, what the Internet is, what they are missing out on, and will it ever affect their lives.
It is a good time to ask such questions because the Federal Government’s Broadband Services Expert Group has just reported and it makes recommendations about how these non-users’ taxes might be spent to make them users either of the Internet or some super-charged version of it. Before looking at the future, let’s ask what is the state of things now? What is the Internet and how does it work. Picture your own computer, or if you don’t have one, picture your own filing cabinet. There are three drawers: private, restricted and public; or three directories: private, restricted and public. Your computer is attached to, say, five or six phone lines; or the handles on your filing cabinet drawers are in the street.
Anyone with the right phone number and computer can dial in or wander past and look inside the public files and take copies of documents (or pictures or sound tapes) within them. They cannot alter any file. Some people have passwords to get into the restricted files. Once again, they cannot alter them. However, they can add a file at any time. Now pictures thousands of these computers or filing cabinets. Some of them are very large. Let’s call them sites. Some of the sites are so large they need someone to look after the files _ chucking away old, useless or offensive files so that the computer or filing cabinet does not overflow.
Some act as gatekeepers allowing people to submit files for inclusion only after prior approval. Now picture a phone-line hub. Users can dial into this hub and it has phone or cables links to many other sites and hubs which in turn have further links. So the user sitting in an office or at home on a computer dials into his or her hub and has access to thousands of sites around the world with millions of files. Further every user has an address, so people can send messages to each other. I fill in the address “”bbloggssiteanu.edu.au” type the message “”hello” and my software signs it from “”crispin ozemail.com.au”. Next time Billy Bloggs logs on he gets my message. The first word after the sign is the site name, the second word whether it is commercial or educational and the last is an abbreviation for the country.
A typical site might be the US Environmental Protection Agency or the University of Alberta Law School. With a local call you can access their public files. And that is the Internet. Sounds great. BUT. . . . 1. The Internet contains an enormous amount of, well, crap. Many of the files are discussions between individuals or ravings of limited veracity. They do not carry even the stamp of authenticity that comes with a newspaper masthead. Others are esoteric academic papers. 2. It is very hard to navigate. You cannot press a few keys and say: “”Internet, give me everything you have got on arsenic contamination and Nepal”. Rather, you have to hop about looking and time means money on the Internet. Often you find nothing. No-one has done the hard work of selection that is done in a newspaper or journal.
There is a lot of good stuff but it is hard to find. 3. Most of the net is dependent on twisted copper wires that were originally intended for telephone voice communication. Very often lots of people want to get to the same sites and there are not enough lines in. Often your own line disconnects just as half an hour’s search is about to reveal a file that contains the critical information you want. “”Oh bother, it appears I have lost half an hour’s work and I don’t know how to get it back”, you say to yourself _ or words to that effect. 4. It can be costly to overcome the above. You need a good Internet access provider and very good software and plenty of time to fiddle about to get it working. This is very much “”messing about in boats” territory. Their services and costs vary. Advertisements appear regularly in the computer pages.
Some provide software to make life easier, or you can buy more specialised software to make it even easier. Try Ozemail (02 4375500), Netinfo (2854277) and for software that makes the frustrating nightmare of extracting things from the Internet to the merely time-consuming but workable try Chameleon (2397533). 5. It is slow. Typically, you get 200 words a second over the phone lines. Graphics verge on the hopeless. The reason it is slow is because it relies on the phone lines _ this is called narrowcast. Effectively, only voice can be transmitted instantaneously. Text and low-grade stills can be transmitted at a moderate pace. And sound recording and video hardly move at all. When you lump voice, text, video and sound together your have broadband. Essentially, it means fibre-optic cable to at lest the street corner or some fancy as-yet-undiscovered technology to make the copper wires work better.
At present we have fibre optic between the capitals, but not to street corners let alone into the home, business or school. To wire Australia it will cost between $20 billion and $45 billion, and perhaps some more when you add in various connectors and computer gear inside the home _ further cause for a Bex and a good lie down. Put simply, the present information highway does not work well and the future one that does work well will cost an enormous amount of money. Where does this leave us? The broadband expert group is very enthusiastic about extending the information superhighway (either the Internet or some form of it). It takes the view that Australia should not sit on its hands and let other countries take the lead and the profits that might come from the creation of software and hardware. Nor should it leap into every and any expensive technology that comes along.
It recommends an evolutionary approach with a fairly hefty kick along from government (all levels) and educational institutions. The key questions are: who is going to pay and who is going to use? The more government involvement there is, the less likely these classes of people will overlap. It will be more like “”we pay; they use”. Usually with new technology, progress is gradual, not because the technology is not up to it, but because the people are not and the economy is not. People resist change or they cannot afford it. As a result it takes a long time for a new technology to replace an old. Cars and horses co-existed. We still have hand-delivered letters in the age of the phone and the fax. Some people go into banks rather than use ATMs. People pay by mail rather than phone. And some people still pay over the counter! None the less the first step crucial in a very large transformation has been taken.
The vast mass of information recorded in western societies is at least recorded or created electronically. Government and business correspondence, lab results, airline bookings, newspaper articles, books etc etc are recorded or created electronically. The next step, which is well under way, is for the information to be (ital) stored (ital) electronically _ in an easily accessible form. Many businesses and government departments still store on paper and any original electronic version is lost.
The third step is when the vast bulk of information is (ital) transmitted (ital) electronically. That is the information superhighway. Now, until society and technology is further into the second step, the third step is premature _ especially at that price tag. There is a conundrum here. People move to new technology slowly. Organisations are moving to electronic storage slowly. Transmission of information electronically is moving gradually and incrementally. However, the so-called information superhighway _ if it is to be super and a highway and work _ is probably going to require a leap. It is going to require more than just optic fibre between the major cities (as now) or telephone exchanges (as planned now). It will require fibre to the street corner and coaxial to the home or fibre all the way to the home itself. Otherwise there is no broadband (video and sound) and no quick transmission of text and still graphics.
The conundrum then is that while the Internet remains on copper wire and therefore slow, hard to use and narrowband, it will be less likely to build up the critical mass needed to justify the leap in investment to provide the optic fibre to make it fast, easy to use and broadband (video and sound) _ yet these are the very factors that will attract the critical mass. This is why the information superhighway is unlike other forms of new technology which permit gradual introduction. To even get near justifying the $40 billion, virtually all government transactions will have to be done electronically _ things like Medicare and social security claims and information requests would have to be done on very easy-to-use press button screens. I am not knocking electronic delivery. It is far more efficient and will ultimately raise our standard of living. How much better to pay an electricity bill by press-button phone than mail (motor bike delivery) or personal delivery by car with associated costs. Electronic transactions have a lower error rate because there is no rekeying of data. Electronic data is far easier to search than paper.
I just question whether Australia is ready for step three before it has taken step two. Trunk fibre optic to the exchanges is probably justifiable for present voice and data demands. But connection to the home carries the extra cost of connectors ($400 to $1000 each) and a computer ($3000) to make it worthwhile. There is a further reason for the Bex-and-a-lie-down approach. If fibre optic is delayed, there is no reason for Australia to fall behind in the technology stakes. This is because we can and are developing content and product on CD-ROM. This can be delivered either on CD or over fibre-optic networks elsewhere or later when it is laid in Australia. So the development of multi-media technology is not dependent on a $40 billion superhighway. This spending is being pushed by those who will get the advantages of it either financially or because they are big information users themselves.
They do not seem to realise that people in the vast mass of Australian households probably have neither the money, time nor inclination to get and use huge amounts more information. Without them the Internet remains a toy for nearly all but its original academic and government users for whom it is a very useful tool. It may be that a gradual introduction to more electronic transmission can come off the back of the pay-television cables. The tragedy here is that two lots of cable are being laid; a huge amount of money is being sent overseas to buy foreign programs and foreign technology; the cable will be connected to only some homes in Sydney and Melbourne.
There is great value in the Internet for those with the money, computer gear and time to use it. But it has been much over-stated. For example, much is made of the fact that one million queries have been lodged with the White House Internet address. Even if they all came from separate people it is half a per cent of the population. A typical US government agency gets about 50,000 queries a year on the net _ 0.025 per cent of the population. Multiply it by the main 40 agencies and you still have only a 1 per cent reach. And still most US Departments have only a fraction of their information stored and retrieval electronically. Australian governments and businesses are much further behind, and the economies of scale are much worse.
Australian businesses and government agencies may create on computer, but they still print out, store and file on paper. And hence they use the fax, the mail the overnight bag _ not the modem _ as their primary means of transmission. So, until a much higher percentage of information is stored electronically and retrievable electronically (ital) within (ital) major business and government organisations, it is fanciful to talk about transmitting the stuff electronically down a superhighway to millions of households.