Objective: In order to understand the social implication of the advances in communication, it is first necessary to study the technical aspect of communications. Then we shall examine the issue of substitution of communication for travel in such social innovations as teleconferencing and telecommuting. The index for this section is:
The electromagnetic spectrum is currently used for many types of analog and digital communication. Electromagnetic waves include radio, light, infrared, x rays, and gamma rays as shown below:
These waves have the following characteristic in a vacuum: C = f w In this equation, C is the velocity of light; f is the frequency; and w is the wave length. The communication capacity of an electromagnetic wave is twice its frequency, and over the electromagnetic spectrum the frequency varies by a factor of 10 raised to the 15 power. [ This number is a million times a million times a thousand.] THIS MEANS THAT THE POTENTIAL CHANNEL CAPACITY OR THE POTENTIAL VOLUME OF MESSAGES VARIES BY THE SAME FACTOR OF 10 TO THE 15TH. The allocation of the spectrum between gadgets( including cordless phones, baby monitors and garage-door openers) CB radios, radio ( AM, FM and shortwave), television, cellular phone, and satellite communications is an economic/political problem controlled in the US by the FCC. As new types of communications devices are developed, turf battles occur over the use of the electromagnetic spectrum. The FCC has auctioned off portions of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Currently the three main types of wired communication are the telephone, Cable TV, and computer networks.
Unlike computation, communication made tremendous advances before the advent of the integrated circuit. Communication engineers developed the analog telephone, which transmits the waveform of human voice, into a worldwide system displacing the telegraph. The evolution of the phone system has been driven by providing humans the type of service they desire. Humans want their conversations over phones to be a close approximation of live conversations between two people. Consequently, phone conversations require a continuously open channel and people want their messages to be transmitted as quickly as they are through the air between two individuals.
Also, as most individuals use their phones at infrequent intervals, the phone system has been designed on the premise that most phones will be idle at any one instance. This fact enables the phone companies to connect phones through exchanges (switches). If the phone companies had simply hardwired every phone to every other phone, the number of connections would have increased as the square of the number of phones. Just imagine the number of wires there would be into your home or apartment. Your phone only requires a single line to the switch where it is connected to other phones as requested by dialing.
The system is designed with a tradeoff between the number of switches and the number of calls which can be processed at one time. For example, if you have 100 telephones and you hook each with every other phone, you need 10000 connections. If you create a switch with 10 input and 10 output lines, ten telephone conversations are possible at one time between any ten pairs of phones. If the switch has 20 input and output lines, twenty pairs of phones can be linked at any one time. To design systems which meet the estimated demand for phone conversations almost all the time, telephone analysts developed a branch of operations research called queuing theory.
To initiate a phone conversation, the two parties must be connected in a phone channel through the switch, which remains continuously open until disconnected by one of the parties. At first phone calls were manually placed by human telephone operators manning the first type of telephone exchanges (switches). Later communication engineers developed automatic switchboards which could connect phones by dialing. The reason for developing switches is a simple matter of economics in that creating automatic switches to replace manual switches greatly reduces the need for labor to operate the phone system.
Currently, the telephone system is in the process of switching from analog to digital. The switch to digital communications is promoted by the advances in microelectronics. These advances in integrated circuit technology can be used to build ever cheaper and more powerful communication devices. For example, today telephone switchboards are simply special purpose computers with software to provide services such as call waiting. Also, with digital communications, errors in communication can be more easily controlled than with analog communication. The telephone system is currently a mix between analog and digital technologies. Currently, long distance is generally digital while local is analog.
Between switches either within a city or between cities, it is not efficient to string a separate phone line for each phone conversation. Instead, phone conversations are multiplexed, that is combined, so that many phone conversations can be carried in a single higher frequency of the electromagnetic spectrum. Over time, the demand for communication capacity for phone traffic, data communications, and now image communication such as pictures and now videoteleconferencing has constantly increased. Consequently, communication engineers have moved to harness higher and higher frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum.
The latest is laser light in optical fibers, which represents an 1,000,000 increase in capacity of over microwave communications. Because these optical fibers can fit in existing copper cable ducts, have a much greater capacity than the copper, and are no more expensive than copper, their use is expanding very rapidly. Through the utilization of railroad rightaways, several optical fiber networks have been constructed to connect the various major communication centers.
A laser light-optical fiber communication system consists of encoding and decoding devices, a transmitter, silica fibers, repeaters, and a receiver. Through applied research the capacity of such systems is increasing 10 fold every four years, and by 1992 it was possible to transmit 100,000 billion bits of information 10 kilometers per second. A basic problem in any communication system is attenuation, which is the disintegration of the signal as it travels down the communication channel. To restore the signal to its original strength amplifiers (repeaters) must be placed at regular intervals in the system. The increase in capacity has been obtained by (1) increasing the purity of the optical fiber, (2) developing optical repeaters, (3) developing better laser generators, and (4) experimenting with various pure and mixed frequencies of laser light. For example, an optical repeater is created by doping the optical fiber with the rare earth element erbium. This is a major advance over previous repeaters which necessitated converting the light beam from light to electricity, amplifying the electrical signal, and then converting the electrical signal back to light.
Finally, the phone systems have had to develop elaborate billing systems to charge individual customers for each long distance call.
Cable TV is currently a high capacity analog signal. Since each station needs a frequency of 6M, 50 cable channels are multiplexed into a signal of 300M hertz. Cable systems frequently use optical fiber to junction boxes and coaxial cables into residences. These coaxial cables have a much higher capacity than the twisted copper wire phone system. With the exception of a few experimental interactive systems, cable systems are one-way communication systems. The amount of interaction in the experimental interactive systems is limited. Because cable systems broadcast a fixed set channels into each home, they have no need for exchanges found in telephone systems. Also, because each household has a fixed number of channels the cable companies do not need an elaborate billing system as that for long distance telephone traffic.
Communication networks for computer communication generally connect office machines or factory machines. LANs (local area networks) are now common in corporations and public institutions. Such networks usually do not have switches like phone networks. A common type is a loop in which messages from the sender travel until they reach the receiver station. The loop is analogous to a party line of telephone. But, as the number of stations on the loop increases the amount of traffic can greatly slow down communication. For this reason in larger organizations networks are subdivided into smaller networks connected by bridges, which connect LANs with the same protocols, and routers, which connect LANs with different protocols. For example, the UT economics department has its own LAN which is connected to the larger UT collection of networks for the various departments and colleges.
Digital data and text communication between machines generally does not require a continuous open channel because the recipient usually will tolerate a time delay between the time the message is sent and the time the message is received. Consequently, such communication can be broken down into standard sized packets which can be sent individually from sender to receiver. One advantage of packet communication is that it provides a mechanism to correct errors or if this can not be accomplished, resend the packet until it is communicated without error. One of the first data protocols was x.25, which is very robust in noisy channels. With less noisy channels, the protocol, Frame Relay sends data more quickly because it spends less time checking for errors.
Packet communication in telephone networks is very different from continuous voice or video communication, which as was pointed out requires a continuous open line. In contrast, each packet can travel a different route thought the communication network. For example. some packets can travel from New York to Los Angeles through Chicago and some through New Orleans. When they arrive all the packets can be assembled into the original message. With a voice of video phone, you either have the capacity to transmit the message in real time or you don't. With a continuously open channel there is no noticeable time delay on the earth. With data packets, the higher the capacity the more quickly the packets can be sent through the system. This is why downloading pictures on Netscape is much faster at UT than at home with a modem. The capacity at UT is at least five times most modems.
The technological frontier is the creation of wide area networks, WANs. Developing WANs is very different from developing LANs. When a LAN is wired into an office, the installers usually use a high capacity line such as coaxial cable or optical fiber. Such LANs have a large capacity. Communicating between offices generally requires renting a line from the phone companies. Capacity is expensive. Consequently developers of WANs must focus on compressing messages to make efficient use of expensive connecting lines. Another problem is the lack of protocols to connect the wide variety of LANs together.
A very important type of computer communication is electronic mail, which is the transmission of text messages through computer networks. Originally corporations created internal worldwide corporate E-mail systems. For example, TI set up its own electronic mail and filing system that connects 50 plants in 19 countries. When set up it could process 10,000 messages and 8c, now but it now can process 33,000 messages at 4c. Alcan installed a $500,000 system for sending orders and inventory information between all its branches and warehouses.
E-mail just simply does not substitute for paper mail, it creates opportunities for innovation. For example, consider an IBM technical person's comparison of two projects he worked on at IBM. The first was the proposed development of a new type of computer terminal in the late sixties. The first draft of the proposal took three days. The draft was sent to various IBMers in the US, Canada, and Europe. Two months later they met for a conference. Every two months they got together to discuss the next draft. Two years later the paper was published. Ten years later the same technical person prepared another paper. Using materials on disk, he finished the paper in one hour. He sent the paper to 25 people via the IBM network. Two hours later he read all their responses, modified the speech, and redistributed it. In one day he made five passes and was complete. (What the report does not tell you is how high the technical person had risen in the hierarchy. I assume he had become so powerful that people would respond quickly. While this does decrease the wonders of technology, the example serves to demonstrate the efficiency of electronic mail.)
Currently their are numerous E-mail systems in information utilities such as CompuServe, Prodigy and Internet. The use of E-mail should explode in the 1990s because of the adoption of the world standard, x.400 and the creation of E-mail directories under the x.500 standard. The adoption of a standard means inter institution E-mail communication becomes as easy as intra institution E-mail today. Gradually intra institutional E-mail systems will either adopt the x.400 and x.500 standards or create an interface making their internal systems externally compatible with these standards.
The importance of E-mail extends far beyond simply sending messages between individuals. E-mail is a carrier which facilitates other types of computer communication such as automatically sending invoices between computers. Thus E-mail will be the basis for much innovation in automating of the flow of paperwork both within and among firms and government.
Check out the telephone, wireless and network sites.
Wireless radio was invented by Marconi at the turn of the century. In the twenties the AM radio broadcast industry was created. Later the higher quality FM radio was introduced. Interactive radio communication is used by ships, airplanes, remote stations, ham operators. The commercial broadcast TV industry was created after World War II. These industries are all allocated portions of the electromagnetic spectrum for their activities.
The disadvantage of satellites at 22,000 miles for voice and video communication is that there is a 1/2 second delay in the communication of the messages because of the distances involved. Motorola is planning a low earth satellite system with 77 satellites which will eliminate the 1/2 second time delay.
Currently, there is an explosive growth in wireless phone systems. Current cellular phone technology is analog. Cellular phones will switch to digital to achieve much greater capacity once standards are agreed upon. A new competitor to the cellular phone network is the personal communications network (PCN). This digital technology uses a much larger number of much cheaper transmitters than cellular. This transformation has hit a major snag in the summer of 1995. The economic incentive to switch to digital has not been to provide the customer better service, but rather make more money by tripling capacity. The problem with the first models of the new digital phones is that they produce very poor voice quality. Until this problem is resolved customers will keep their analog equipment. .
Many corporations are creating worldwide wireless communications networks. For example, Motorola is in the process of setting up Iridium, a worldwide wireless network using low-orbit satellites mentioned above. In less developed countries it is much faster to set up a wireless telephone system than a modern wired system. This system if installed could in the long run completely bypass the phone systems. This would by a wireless phone system with local towers and the capacity to communicate through the satellites. In the US, Ardis and Ram Mobile Data are building nationwide wireless data networks. At Pitney-Bowes 3,500 repair technicians use the Ardis network to obtain repair information. Federal Express and UPS have their own networks to be able to maintain continuous monitoring of the delivery of parcels.
Communications is gradually converging into a single fiber optic and wireless worldwide network for all types of communication. To understand the problems in creating this network we need to understand the concept of information from the perspective of communication engineers. This concepts enables communication engineers to design communication networks with enough capacity to carry the intended messages. It also provides a theory to obtain the maximum compression of digital messages.
Shannon in 1949 developed a theory of communication based on a measure of information which enables communication engineers to determine the communication capacity required to communicate the messages. In order to discuss Shannon's measure of the information content in a message, consider the following simple diagram of a communication system:
At the information source the input message is digitized and at the destination the message is converted back into the input form, that is, text, voice, etc. Noise will cause the output to differ from the input. To build a communication system, we need know the volume of the message. Intuitively, consider a fresh water system in a city. To build this system you must know the size of pipe to transmit the desired amount of water to each household. Since we have converted the message into binary code, Shannon's contribution was to define the message volume in bits.
To gain some intuitive understanding of his concept we need to consider some examples. If you had to transmit an infinite string of 1's with no zero's, you can use the string's pattern to greatly compress the number of bits you must transmit. In this case, once you remove the pattern there is nothing left to transmit. Now suppose 0's were placed at random intervals in the string of 1's. You would have to transmit the pattern of all ones and also transmit the locations of the zero's. The greater difficulty in transmitting the second message over the first is directly related to the number of randomly spaced 0's. Now consider a picture composed of a green field. To transmit the message all you must transmit is the pattern. The video message becomes progressively more difficult to transmit depending on the number of blue dots randomly placed in the picture. The Shannon information message is a measure of the randomness, or entropy, of the message. Shannon's measure says nothing about the meaning of the message. The communication engineer does not care whether the message is nonsense syllables or national secrets. Entropy or randomness refers to number of bits required to transmit the random elements. Shannon is very important because he provided communication engineers with a theory for designing appropriately sized communication channels for transmitting the information content of the messages. If the channel capacity is greater than the information measure (entropy) of the message, it is theoretically possible to transmit the message without error in a noisy channel. On the crest and trough of every wave you can place a bit or no bit. Thus to transmit a message the frequency of channel must be greater than one half the number of bits which must be transmitted per second.
Digital communications presents a fundamental problem in that the raw digitization of analog messages greatly increases their size. One approach is to use a bigger communication channel to transmit the digitized message. A better approach to deal with raw digitized messages is to compress the message using compression algorithms, which in the case of teleconferencing are called codeces. For example, a telephone conversation is digitized into 64,000 bits/sec. The entropy measure of a voice message may be less than 1000 bits/sec. Communication engineers have developed techniques to compress messages so that the amount of bits is closer to the entropy measure. For example, telephone conversations can be transmitted by voice recorder at 2400 baud, a term meaning bits per second. In order to market inexpensive teleconferencing there are powerful incentives to compress video messages. The current status is:
| Type | Baud (transmission) Rate | |
|---|---|---|
| Slides | 1.2K - 56K | |
| Poor to medium quality motion | 56K - 1.2M | |
| Quality motion | 1.2M - 140M |
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You should anticipate rapid advances in message compression which will reduce the baud rate required to transmit various types of images. Transmitting a detailed picture with motion is bound to be 1000 times as costly as transmitting text and about 100 times as expensive as transmitting voice. We do not use video for communication today simply because it is far too expensive.
Check out current compression schemes for video, courtesy of MCI. Check out two new promising types of compression technology:
The market in telecommunications, which is growing rapidly, is in a state of flux both in terms of corporate structure and in terms of technology.
Two factors have greatly increased the competition in computing and communications. First, with communication becoming digital the boundary between computation and communication has disappeared. Communication corporations have moved into computation and vice versa. For example, AT&Tbought NCR, a computer firm, and IBM has several communications ventures. Second, competition in communication has greatly intensified with the breakup of the Bell system. As you may know, several years ago the courts broke apart the Bell system into AT&T(long distance) and the seven baby Bells (local service). Over time the court-imposed restrictions on the baby Bells have been eliminated. A fierce competition between the Bells and the cable TV companies has begun. The Bells can now offer cable TV through the phone system. This creates the incentives to replace the twisted copper wire local phone system with optical fiber. Cable companies can offer reasonably high capacity lines through their coaxial cables. Right now mergers are taking place between different types of communications and media companies to position themselves to compete in a joint fiber optics-wireless world.
a. Short Run: There is considerable doubt just how the communications systems will evolve. The telephone system planned two major expansions in communications. The first is a communication protocol called ISDN, integrated services digital network. This system will be an all digital system using the existing copper wire installed phone system. An ISDN line into a home will have two 64K digital channels and one 16K packet data channel. ISDN integrates voice, data, fixed image such as FAX, and limited dynamic image such as poor quality teleconferencing. By creating better algorithms for compression, better image communication can be transmitted through ISDN. Individuals or businesses which need higher capacity lines can lease more 64K channels which can be merged into a larger channel. ISDN is available now and may become common early in the next century. The long run plan for communications is bandwidth on demand. This system, which will require an expansion of the ISDN protocol to include high capacity communication, will be based on laser light as the media and fiber optics as the carrier.
The problem with ISDN is that the Bell system procrastinated in its implementation. Currently it is an obsolete protocol. A desirable system would facilitate the integration of continuous type communication, voice and video teleconferencing, and packet, data, text, and still image. A compromise which has been proposed is ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode). This protocol breaks all types of communications into standard 53-byte packet. It can accommodate voice, audio, ASCII text, a series of Ethernet of FDDI frames, or a combination of the above. ATM supplies bandwidth on demand. ATM packets can be switched in hardware much more quickly than the proposed ISDN protocol messages. The first generation ATM switches(telephone exchanges) can accommodate 2.4 billion bits a second. Under such a system video phone calls would be as cheap as current voice calls. ATM may win out over time.
Currently Congress is revising the 1934 Communication Act. Since the 1930s the philosophy of regulating communications has changed. Then the problem was how to regulate monopolies, now the problem is how to promote competition. For example, today there is competition in the long distance phone business. Because of wireless communication there could also be competition in the local business. Phone companies could compete with cable companies in the delivery of cable television. Most economists agree that the public interest would be served by promoting competition in all aspects of communications. With competition the evolution of the communications systems will be demand driven.
b. Long Run: In your lifetime, computers at all levels may become 10,000 times as fast as they are now and also increase that much in memory. At a super computer conference I went to a few years ago, they were conjecturing about when today's supercomputers would be desktop computers for engineers. The big advance in software, artificial intelligence application, will make computers much easier to use. New devices such as neural networks will increase pattern recognition so that languages can be based on voice recognition of structured English.
Paper as a media of communication is on its way out. All office equipment is currently being linked into a network so that documents and data can be transmitted over the telephone system. Paper will gradually become the secondary media. Existing one time write optical disks could fulfill the legal requirement for a media which can not be easily tampered with. ISDN will make it possible to transmit a book into your local memory in about a minute for the price of a current phone conversation. With fiber optics the capacity of residential phone system will initially increase from 144 thousand bits per second to 140 million bits per second and then over time increase into the billions of bits per second as the potential capacity of optical fiber is utilized either by a broadband ISDN protocol or ATM protocol. This system should be in place in thirty years. With bandwidth on demand, the phone system becomes a multiple dynamic interactive video voice communications system called the social nervous system. By the social nervous system we mean:
a. A broadband digital communication system capable of carrying any media-voice, data, symbols, or video which links every home and office.
b. Every home and office would have at least one smart terminal capable of handling all the various media.
c. All man's knowledge or recorded experience whether in the form of documents, books, video, or sound cassettes would potentially be available from any terminal (provided the individual has access).
d. Electronics will replace paper as the primary media for text. One time write optical disks will become the legal media for recording important documents.
The speed at which such a system is installed depends on economic incentives. For example, currently optical fiber is about as cheap as copper wire. Hence, new subdivisions will be increasingly wired with optical fiber as opposed to copper to anticipate the future system. With the lifting of the restrictions on the phone companies, they should move quickly to replace the existing copper wire system with a fiber optics system into every residence in order to sell video services. My forecast is 20 years for fiber optics to become commonplace in residences.
The usefulness of the existing copper wire phone system depends on the speed of modems. Check out The ADSL Forum. Two types of communication technology you need to understand are:
There is also a large number of sites discussing communications policy. Check them out.
With vast amounts of personal and corporate information both in databases and being transmitted through communication systems there is a pressing need for security in computer-communication systems. However, the more secure you make a computer-communication system from hackers the harder access becomes for legitimate users. Computer-communication systems can never be made completely secure against unauthorized users. Military style encryption, the translation of computer-communication information into code, is a current trend in computing and communication. Is all information being used by computers or communicated between people or machines going to be encrypted? Currently there is a major battle between police organizations and business concerning cryptography. The National Security Administration and the FBI want to be able to tap into any communications (with a warrant, of course) for the purpose of catching criminals. They propose a cryptography system developed by the NSA called a Clipper chip. Computer experts are opposed because they believe the NSA has a backdoor to easily listen to any communication message. Also, organized crime would have the resources to break such a system and steal bank transfers. Businesses generally want unlimited encryption to protect vital corporate secrets. Recently the Clinton administration rejected the NSA encryption scheme.
Increasingly, many kinds of decisions will be made by analyzing alternatives using databases. This will include personal decisions as well as political-economic decisions. Man as a decision maker has limited cognitive skills. This limit has been called bounded rationality by the Nobel laureate H. Simon. Using decision aids humans can make better decisions in all aspects of life. To make computer aided decisions requires relevant databases. This raises a fundamental conflict between privacy and property rights versus the data needed for making better decisions. Computer based decisions make the information structure or what information should be available for each type of decision a fundamental policy issue. For example, credit data bases enable stores to determine a consumers credit rating quickly at low cost. This is the basis for the credit oriented consumer market. Without such data bases it would be much more difficult to obtain auto and home loans.
With the channel capacity expansion of the communication system, the cost of transmitting a bit of a message will fall at a rapid rate. Types of communication requiring higher baud (bits per second), for example, video, will gradually become more commonplace. Technological advances may decrease the cost of transportation, but not nearly as much as technological advances will decrease the cost of communication. Thus, one would expect a substitution of communication for travel. Modern society is organized around the automobile. Most people live within a 20 minute commute from work. This means the auto transportation system is built to handle the peak morning and evening traffic loads. During the rest of the day, the system has considerable wasted idle capacity. Moreover, autos are one of the principal sources of pollution. In areas such as Denver and LA where inversion layers are common, social costs, health problems in the respiratory system, are also incurred. Also, communication requires much less energy than transportation. For these reasons, society would be better off with less commuting.
Prior to the first industrial revolution, most people worked out of their homes. In industries such as cloth manufacturing, the merchant took raw wool to farmers' cottages to be spun into thread. Then the merchant picked up the thread and took it to the weavers cottage to be woven into cloth. The merchant then took the cloth to another cottage to be dyed. Work was brought to the home. Artisans generally had their homes attached to their shops. The custom of commuting to work began very recently. As automation of manufacturing proceeds, work will increasingly involve the manipulation of informational objects. As the manipulation takes place through a terminal, the substitution of communication for travel depends on how effective groups can be at accomplishing tasks through communication networks.
How we physically locate people in an organization for effective problem solving requires experiments to find out how people communicate in problem solving. Currently in large organizations there is much decentralization in location. The issue is: Given all our new communication/computing equipment, what activities can be accomplished effectively remotely?
In one experiment, two groups in separate rooms were tested in the speed at which they could solve simple problems:
i. Assembly of a trash can carrier when one group had the parts and the other the instructions
ii. Find all the citations relevant to an article when one group has the article and the other the index.
iii. Find the closest physician when one group has the address and the map while the other group has the list of physicians.
The two groups could communicate:
i. Communication rich: voice and video
ii. Voice
iii. Hand written messages
iv. Typing: inexperienced
v. Typing: experienced.
The results indicated that to solve problems:
| Message | __Rich__ | __Voice_ | __Hand__ | __Type__ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ave Time | 29 | 33 | 53 | 69 |
| No. Mess | 230 | 163 | 16 | 32 |
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Some business research indicates that effective interactions can take place with a meeting and subsequent phone conversations. This raises the issue of what type of human interactions need to be face to face in institutions for effective institutional performance.
Recently, researchers have been investigating how groups solve problems in computer networks when the identity of messenger is not revealed. This totally changes the behavior from a face to face meeting where everyone knows who is speaking. In a face to face meeting the hierarchy of status determines who speaks and how much. A network problem solving session is much more democratic with much greater interaction.
There are many types of teleconferencing. The oldest, simplest, and cheapest type of teleconferencing is a conference phone call. Advances in teleconferencing are proceeding in two directions. One advance is in teleconferencing taking place in special teleconferencing rooms or with special equipment. Another are advances in teleconferencing in computer networks.
Let us first consider special teleconferencing rooms or equipment. In this approach a more advanced type is voice and slides, and the most advanced type is video teleconferencing with dynamic video, voice, and data. In 1982 ARCO spent $20Mfor a teleconferencing system because the chairman traveled 600 to 700 miles everyday for the past 35 years. ARCO's system includes one TV screen for pictures and one for data (Alaska to LA) and they also plan to expand network and transmit data from seismic tests. Video teleconferencing is growing at 20 to 40%a year. With increased long distance communication competition through the creation of fiber optic networks with tremendous excess capacity rates should continue a downward trend. As the demand for teleconferencing services increases, producers obtain economies of scale in production. For example, to reduce the cost of full video conferences, one company has set up a video conference 'coop' to sell the unused time at facilities set up by corporations. Later, Aetna set up video conference rooms to link its corporate center with its data processing center which were 15 miles away. It cost $250,000 to build and cost $250/hr to operate. Before Aetna set up this system, 500 programmers met 3000 times a month with managers in the headquarters. Aetna has installed video conference rooms in its Chicago, San Francisco and Dallas offices. By 1986, a typical video conference rooms center cost more than $200,000. A year later the cost fell to $120,000 and by 1989 to $60,000. The cost is projected to be below $15,000 by the end of 1993. At the same time the cost of phone lines for video conference rooms has fallen from $1600to less than $20per hour.
A form of teleconferencing in computer networks is collaborative computing. Lotus notes is an example of software which allows groups to work together. You should in the next few years expect a large number of software packages which allow groups of people at remote personal computer locations to exchange text, data and still images. PC manufacturers are now creating PCs which incorporate a videocam for videoconferencing through computer networks. Such videoconferencing will become commonplace in LANs before WANs. This may not become commonplace in WANs until the capacity of the phone system expands to cheaply handle desktop videoconferencing.
Low cost video teleconferencing offers businesses many advantages. Teleconferences generally can be set much more quickly than business meetings involving people at large distances. In addition, teleconferencing is cheaper than travel. Finally executives are more effective not have to work in airplanes and hotel rooms. A success story with teleconferencing is M/A Com. Teleconferencing is used to manage 26 companies. Teleconferencing links small office in Boca Raton, Fla to four M/A Con centers in San Diego,CA; Catawba, N.C.; Germantown, MD; and Burlington, MA. The company is also a vendor of teleconferencing systems that make use of its satellite link. Instead of two to three days to arrange cross country meetings, thirty minutes is required to arrange teleconference meetings. What this means is that M/A Con can respond very quickly to changing market conditions. Yes, not all businesses are jumping into teleconferencing. Many will wait until substantial savings have been demonstrated by the leaders.
Various forms of teleconferencing are also being created in computer networks. The simplest is the chat mode of information utilities. More advanced versions of text teleconferencing are in widespread use. One example is the US Army Missile command. Currently, communications companies are creating video teleconferencing systems in computer networks. For example, Northern Telecom has developed the Visit system which is an $3899addon to a PC or Mac. This system provides a separate window for the image of both parties on both screens delivering 8-14 frames per second. In addition, both participants can bring up a drawing or document in a shared workspace. As multimedia PCs become commonplace video conference rooms will be accomplished with an installed video camera and a board for transmission and reception for less than a thousand.
In the 70's a research group lead by J. Niles demonstrated that using existing technology, corporations such as insurance companies could decentralize into a group of local offices connected by communications and be just as effective. The major advantage to decentralization is much less distance to commute by workers which results in much less smog.
In London, Mrs. "Steve" Shirley organized F International Ltd., a company where everyone works at home connected through terminals. This software firm does $5Ma year business and most of the workers are women with children. Telecommuting enables F International to obtain skilled workers who otherwise would not be able to participate in the workforce.
Telecommuting does not bring positive benefits to all participants. Generally, professional benefit from telecommuting because they can have a wider choice in lifestyles. For example, a couple of years ago Business Week reported on a partner of a Chicago law firm who telecommuted from Teluride, Colorado. Phone calls were automatically rerouted to Telerude. If he was called before 10am, he could make a business meeting in Chicago that evening. Towns in Colorado are so interested in acquiring telecommuters they are installing better communications to attract them. Compaq made its salespeople telecommutes with both corporate and personal success.
In contrast, clerical workers frequently do not benefit from telecommuting. Business managers have used telecommuting as a device to eliminate fringe benefits and place telecommuters on piecework wages for typing and so on. There have been law suits against this practice.
Telecommuting will increase as automation displaces people from manipulating physical objects and the channel capacity of the communication system makes video communication inexpensive. With the TV flat screen which is just coming online currently, you could have a wall with multiscreens for each participant in a conference. Most critics of telecommuting do not perceive the impact of the vast increase in channel capacity. New social customs will evolve for telecommuters, however, this will take time. The cottage workers who did not want to work in the textile factories tried to destroy them. There is generally a tremendous resistance to social change.
The major growth in telecommuting will not be in full time telecommuting but in part time telecommuting. With the rapid advance in wireless communication, notebook computers and other portable electronic gear, individuals can link up with their offices from any location. This means they only have to be in the office for face to face meetings. Corporations are going to promote telecommuting in cities with dirty air because of provisions in the Clean Air Act of 1990. Thirteen cities with dirty air must increase the average number of riders per car from 1.3 to 1.5 to prevent 3.5 million tons of carbon from polluting the air by the year 2000. Telecommuting satisfies the requirement for increasing ridership.
There are numerous sites for teleconferencing and telecommuting. Check them out.
Finally, check out the issues about Cyberculture.