The Road Ahead

5 PATHS TO THE HIGHWAY

Before we can enjoy the benefits of the applications and appliances described in the preceding chapter, the information highway has to exist. It doesn’t yet. This may surprise some people, who hear everything from a long-distance telephone network to the Internet described as “the information superhighway.” The truth is that the full highway is unlikely to be available in homes for at least a decade.

Personal computers, multi-media CD-ROM software, high-capacity cable television networks, wired and wireless telephone networks, and the Internet are all important precursors of the information highway. Each is suggestive of the future. But none represents the actual information highway.

Constructing the highway will be a big job. It will require the installation not only of physical infrastructure, such as fiber-optic cable and high-speed switches and servers, but also the development of software platforms. In chapter 3, I discussed the evolution of the hardware and the software platform that enabled the PC. Applications for the information highway, such as those I described in chapter 4, will also have to be built on a platform—one that will evolve out of the PC and the Internet. The same sort of competition that took place within the PC industry during the 1980s is taking place now to create the software components that will constitute the information highway platform.

The software that runs the highway will have to offer great navigation and security, electronic mail and bulletin board capabilities, connections to competing software components, and billing and accounting services.

Component providers for the highway will make available tools and user-interface standards so it will be easy for designers to create applications, set up forms, and manage databases of information on the system. To make it possible for applications to work together seamlessly, the platform will have to define a standard for user profiles so that information about user preferences can be passed from one application to another. This sharing of information will enable applications to do their best to meet user needs.

A number of companies, including Microsoft, confident that there will be a profitable business in supplying software for the highway, are competing to develop components of the platform. These components will be the foundation on which information highway applications can be built. There will be more than one successful software provider for the highway, and their software will interconnect.

The highway’s platform will also have to support many different kinds of computers, including servers and all the information appliances. The customers for much of this software will be the cable systems, telephone companies, and other network providers, rather than individuals, but consumers will ultimately decide which succeed. The network providers will gravitate toward the software that offers consumers the best applications and the broadest range of information. So the first competition among companies developing platform software will be waged for the hearts and minds of applications developers and information providers, because their work will create most of the value.

As applications develop, they will demonstrate the value of the information highway to potential investors—a crucial step, considering the amount of money building the highway will require. Today’s estimates put the cost at about $1,200, give or take a couple of hundred dollars, depending on architecture and equipment choices, to connect one information appliance (such as a TV or a PC) in each U.S. home to the highway. This price includes running the fiber into every neighborhood, the servers, the switches and electronics in the home. With roughly 100 million homes in the United States, this works out to around $120 billion of investment in one country alone.

Nobody is going to spend this kind of money until it is clear that the technology really works and that consumers will pay enough for the new applications. The fees customers will pay for television service, including video-on-demand, won’t pay for building the highway. To finance the construction, investors will have to believe new services will generate almost as much revenue again as cable television does today. If the financial return on the highway is not evident, investment money isn’t going to materialize and construction of the highway will be delayed. This is just as it should be. It would be ridiculous to do the buildout until private firms see the likelihood of a return on their investment. I think investors will become confident of such a return as innovators bring new ideas to the trials. Once investors begin to understand the new applications and services and the potential financial payback for the highway infrastructure is proven, there will be little trouble raising the necessary capital. The outlay will be no greater than that for other infrastructures we take for granted. The roads, water mains, sewers, and electrical connections that run to a house each costs as much.

I’m optimistic. The growth of the Internet over the past few years suggests that highway applications will quickly become extremely popular and justify large investments. The “Internet” refers to a group of computers connected together, using standard “protocols” (descriptions of technologies) to exchange information. It’s a long way from being the highway, but it’s the closest approximation we have today, and will evolve into the highway.

The popularity of the Internet is the most important single development in the world of computing since the IBM PC was introduced in 1981. The PC analogy is apt for many reasons. The PC wasn’t perfect. Aspects of it were arbitrary or even poor. Despite that, its popularity grew to the point where it became the standard for applications development. Companies that tried to fight the PC standards often had good reasons for doing so, but their efforts failed because so many other companies were continuing to work to try and improve the PC.

Today’s Internet is made up of a loose collection of interconnecting commercial and noncommercial computer networks, including on-line information services to which users subscribe. Servers are scattered around the world, linked to the Internet on a variety of high- and low-capacity paths. Most consumers use personal computers to plug into the system through the telephone network, which has a low bandwidth and so can’t carry many bits per second. “Modems” (shorthand for modulator-demodulators) are the devices that connect phone lines to PCs. Modems, by converting to 0s and 1s into different tones, allow computers to connect over phone lines. In the early days of the IBM PC, modems typically carried data at the rate of 300 or 1,200 bits per seconds (also known as 300 or 1,200 “baud"). Most of the data transmitted through phone lines at these speeds was text, because transmitting pictures was painfully slow when so little information could be transferred each second. Faster modems have gotten much more affordable. Today, many modems that connect PCs to other computers via the phone system can send and receive 14,400 (14.4K) or 28,800 (28.8K) bits per second. From a practical standpoint, this is still insufficient bandwidth for many kinds of transmissions. A page of text is sent in a second, but a complete, screen-sized photograph, even if compressed, requires perhaps ten seconds at these baud rates. It takes minutes to send a color photograph with enough resolution for it to be made into a slide. Motion video would take so much time to transmit it just isn’t practical at these speeds.

Already, anyone can send anyone else a message on the Internet for business, education, or just the fun of it. Students around the world can send messages to one another. Shut-ins can carry on animated conversations with friends they might never get out to meet. Correspondents who might be uncomfortable talking to each other in person have forged bonds across a network. The information highway will add video, which unfortunately will do away with the social, racial, gender, and species blindness that text-only exchanges permit.

The Internet and other information services carried on telephone networks suggest some aspects of how the information highway will operate. When I send you a message, it is transmitted by phone line from my computer to the server that has my “mailbox,” and from there it passes directly or indirectly to whichever server stores your mailbox. When you connect to your server, via the telephone network or a corporate computer network, you are able to retrieve ("download") the contents of your mailbox, including my message. That’s how electronic mail works. You can type a message once and send it to one person or twenty-five, or post it on what is called a “bulletin board.”

Like its namesake, an electronic bulletin board is where messages are left for anyone to read. Public conversations result, as people respond to messages. These exchanges are usually asynchronous. Bulletin boards typically are organized by topics to serve specific communities of interest. This makes them effective ways to reach targeted groups. Commercial services offer bulletin boards for pilots, journalists, teachers, and much smaller communities. On the Internet, where the often unedited and unmoderated bulletin boards are called “usenet newsgroups,” there are thousands of communities devoted to topics as narrow as caffeine, Ronald Reagan, and neckties. You can download all the messages on a topic, or just recent messages, or all messages from a certain person, or those that respond to a particular other message, or that contain a specific word in their subject line, and so forth.

In addition to electronic mail and file exchange, the Internet supports “Web browsing,” one of its most popular applications. The “World Wide Web” (abbreviated as the Web or WWW) refers to those servers connected to the Internet that offer graphical pages of information. When you connect to one of those servers, a screen of information with a number of hyperlinks appears. When you activate a hyperlink by clicking on it with your mouse, you are taken to another page containing additional information and other hyperlinks. That page may be stored on the same server or any other server on the Internet.

The main page for a company or an individual is called the “home” page. If you create one, you register its electronic address, then Internet users can find you by typing in the address. In advertisements today we are starting to see home page citations as part of the address information. The software to set up a Web server is very cheap and available for almost all computers. The software to browse the Web is also available for all machines, generally for free. You can Web browse using the CD that comes with this book. In the future, operating systems will integrate Internet browsing.

The ease with which companies and individuals can publish information on the Internet is changing the whole idea of what it means to “publish.” The Internet has, on its own, established itself as a place to publish content. It has enough users so that it is benefiting from positive feedback: the more subscribers it gets, the more content it gets, and the more content it gets, the more subscribers it gets.

The Internet’s unique position arises from a number of elements. The TCP/IP protocols that define its transport level support distributed computing and also scale incredibly well. The protocols that define Web browsing are extremely simple and have allowed servers to handle immense amounts of traffic reasonably well. Many of the predictions about interactive books and hyperlinks—made decades ago by pioneers like Ted Nelson—are coming true on the Web.

Today’s Internet is not the information highway I imagine, although you can think of it as the beginning of the highway. An analogy is the Oregon Trail. Between 1841 and the early 1860s, more than 300,000 hardy souls rode wagon trains out of Independence, Missouri, for a dangerous 2,000-mile journey across the wilderness to the Oregon Territories or the gold fields of California. An estimated 20,000 succumbed to marauders, cholera, starvation, or exposure. Their route was named the Oregon Trail. You could easily say the Oregon Trail was the start of today’s highway system. It crossed many boundaries and provided two-way traffic to travelers in wheeled vehicles. The modern path of Interstate 84 and several other highways follows the Oregon Trail for much of its length. However, many conclusions drawn from descriptions of the Oregon Trail would be misleading if applied to the future system. Cholera and starvation aren’t a problem on Interstate 84. Tailgating and drunk drivers weren’t much of a hazard for the wagon trains.

The trail blazed by the Internet will direct many elements of the highway. The Internet is a wonderful, critical development and a very clear element of the final system, but it will change significantly in the years ahead. The current Internet lacks security and needs a billing system. Much of the Internet culture will seem as quaint to future users of the information highway as stories of wagon trains and pioneers on the Oregon Trail do to us today.

In fact, the Internet of today is not the Internet of even a short time ago. The pace of its evolution is so rapid that a description of the Internet as it existed a year or even six months ago might be seriously out-of-date. This adds to the confusion. It is very hard to stay up-to-date with something so dynamic. Many companies, including Microsoft, are working together to define standards in order to extend the Internet and overcome its limitations.

Because the Internet originated as a computer-science proiect rather than a communications utility, it has always been a magnet for hackers—programmers who turn their talents toward mischief or malice by breaking into the computer systems of others.

On November 2, 1988, thousands of computers connected to the network began to slow down. Many eventually ground to a temporary halt. No data were destroyed, but millions of dollars of computing time were lost as computer system administrators fought to regain control of their machines. Much of the public may have heard of the Internet for the first time when this story was widely covered. The cause turned out to be a mischievous computer program, called a “worm,” that was spreading from one computer to another on the network, replicating as it went. (It was designated a worm rather than a virus because it didn’t infect other programs.) It used an unnoticed “back door” in the systems’ software to access directly the memory of the computers it was attacking. There it hid itself and passed around misleading information that made it harder to detect and counteract. Within a few days The New York Times identified the hacker as Robert Morris, Jr., a twenty-three-year-old graduate student at Cornell University. Morris later testified that he had designed and then unleashed the worm to see how many computers it would reach, but a mistake in his programming caused the worm to replicate far faster than he had expected. Morris was convicted of violating the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a federal offense. He was sentenced to three years of probation, a fine of $10,000, and 400 hours of community service.

There have been occasional breakdowns and security problems, but not many, and the Internet has become a reasonably reliable communications channel for millions of people. It provides worldwide connections between servers, facilitating the exchange of electronic mail, bulletin board items, and other data. The exchanges range from short messages of a few dozen characters to multimillion-byte transfers of photographs, software, and other kinds of data. It costs no more to request data from a server that is a mile away than from one that is thousands of miles distant.

Already the Internet’s pricing model has changed the notion that communication has to be paid for by time and distance. The same thing happened with computing. If you couldn’t afford a big computer you used to pay for computer time by the hour. PCs changed that.

Because the Internet is inexpensive to use, people assume it is government funded. That isn’t so. However, the Internet is an outgrowth of a 1960s government project: the ARPANET, as it was called, was initially used solely for computer-science and engineering projects. It became a vital communications link among far-flung project collaborators but was virtually unknown to outsiders.

In 1989, the U.S. government decided to stop funding ARPANET, and plans were laid for a commercial successor, to be called the “Internet.” The name was derived from that of the underlying communications protocol. Even when it became a commercial service, the Internet’s first customers were mostly scientists at universities and companies in the computer industry, who used it for exchanging e-mail.

The financial model that allows the Internet to be so suspiciously cheap is actually one of its most interesting aspects. If you use a telephone today, you expect to be charged for time and distance. Businesses that call one remote site a great deal avoid these charges by getting a leased line, a special-purpose telephone line dedicated to calls between the two sites. There are no traffic charges on a leased line—the same amount is charged for it each month no matter how much it is used.

The foundation of the Internet consists of a bunch of these leased lines connected by switching systems that route data. The long-distance Internet connections are provided in the United States by five companies, each of which leases lines from telecommunications carriers. Since the breakup of AT&T, the charges for leased lines have become very competitive. Because the volume of traffic on the Internet is so large, these five companies qualify for the lowest possible rates—which means they carry enormous bandwidth quite inexpensively.

The term “bandwidth” deserves further explanation. As I said, it refers to the speed at which a line can carry information to connected devices. The bandwidth depends, in part, on the technology used to transmit and receive the information. Telephone networks are designed for two-way private connections with low bandwidth. Telephones are analog devices that communicate with the telephone company’s equipment by means of fluctuating currents—analogs of the sounds of voices. When an analog signal is digitized by a long-distance telephone company, the resulting digital signal contains about 64,000 bits of information per second.

The coaxial cables used to carry cable television broadcasts have much higher bandwidth potential than standard telephone wires because they have to be able to carry higher-frequency video signals. Cable TV systems today, however, don’t transmit bits; they use analog technology to transmit thirty to seventy-five channels of video. Coaxial cable can easily carry hundreds of millions or even a billion bits per second, but new switches will have to be added to allow them to support digital-information transmission. A long-distance fiber-optic cable that carries 1.7 billion bits of information from one repeater station (something like an amplifier) to another has sufficient bandwidth for 25,000 simultaneous telephone conversations. The number of possible conversations rises significantly if the conversations are compressed by removing redundant information, such as the pauses between words and sentences, so that each conversation consumes fewer bits.

Most businesses use a special kind of telephone line to connect to the Internet. It is called a T-1 line and carries 1.5 million bits per second, which is relatively high bandwidth. Subscribers pay the local phone company a monthly charge for the T-1 line (which moves their data to the nearest Internet access point) and then pay a flat rate of about $20,000 a year to the company connecting them to the Internet. That yearly charge, based on the capacity of the connection, or “on ramp,” covers all of their Internet usage whether they use the Internet constantly or never use it at all, and whether their Internet traffic goes a few miles or across the globe. The sum of these payments funds the entire Internet network.

This works because the costs are based on paying for capacity, and the pricing has simply followed. It would require a lot of technology and effort for the carriers to keep track of time and distance. Why should they bother if they can make a profit without having to? This pricing structure means that once a customer has an Internet connection there is no extra cost for extensive use, which encourages usage. Most individuals can’t afford to lease a T-1 line. To connect to the Internet, they contact a local on-line service provider. This is a company that has paid the $20,000 per year to connect via T-1 or other high-speed means to the Internet. Individuals use their regular phone lines to call the local service provider and it connects them to the Internet. A typical monthly charge is $20, for which you get twenty hours of prime-time usage.

Providing access to the Internet will become even more competitive in the next few years. Large phone companies around the world will enter the business. Prices will come down significantly. The on-line service companies such as CompuServe and America Online will be including Internet access as part of their charges. Over the next few years the Internet will improve and provide easy access, wide availability, a consistent user interface, easy navigation, and integration with other commercial on-line services.

One technical challenge still facing the Internet is how to handle “real-time” content—specifically audio (including voice) and video. The underlying technology of the Internet doesn’t guarantee that data will move from one point to another at a constant rate. The congestion on the network determines how quickly packets are sent. Various clever approaches do allow high-quality two-way audio and video to be delivered, but full audio and video support will require significant changes in the network and probably won’t be available for several years.

When these changes do happen, they will set up the Internet in direct competition with the phone companies’ voice networks. Their different pricing approaches will make the competition interesting to watch.

As the Internet is changing the way we pay for communication, it may also change how we pay for information. There are those who think the Internet has shown that information will be free, or largely so. Although a great deal of information, from NASA photos to bulletin board entries donated by users, will continue to be free, I believe the most attractive information, whether Hollywood movies or encyclopedic databases, will continue to be produced with profit in mind.

Software programs are a particular kind of information. There is a lot of free software on the Internet today, some of it quite useful. Often this is software written as a graduate-student project or at a government-funded lab. However, I think that the desire for quality, support, and comprehensiveness for a tool as important as software means that demand for commercial software will continue to grow. Already, many students and faculty members who wrote free software at universities are busy writing business plans for start-up companies to provide commercial versions of their software with more features. Software developers, both those who want to charge for their product and those who want to give it away, will have an easier time getting it distributed than they do now.

All of this bodes well for the future information highway. However, before it becomes a reality, a number of transitional technologies will be used to bring us new applications. While they will fall short of what will be possible once the full-bandwidth highway is available, they will be a step beyond what we can do now. These evolutionary advances are inexpensive enough to be cost-justified with applications that already work and have proven demand.

Some of the transitional technologies will rely on telephone networks. By 1997, most fast modems will support the simultaneous transmission of voice and data across existing phone lines. When you’re making travel plans, if you and your travel agent both have PCs, she might show you photos of each of the different hotels you’re considering, or display a little grid comparing prices. When you call a friend to ask how he layered his pastry to get it to rise so high, if you both have PCs connected to your phone lines, during the conversation, while your dough is resting, he will be able to transmit a diagram to you.

The technology that will make this possible goes by the acronym DSVD, which stands for digital simultaneous voice data. It will demonstrate, more clearly than anything has so far, the possibilities of sharing information across a network. I believe it will be adopted widely over the next three years. It is inexpensive because it requires no change to the existing telephone system. The phone companies won’t have to modify their switches or increase your phone bill. DSVD works as long as the instruments at both ends of a conversation are equipped with appropriate modems and PC software.

Another interim step for using the phone companies’ network does require special telephone lines and switches. The technology is called ISDN (for integrated services digital network). It transfers voice and data starting at 64,000 or 128,000 bits per second, which means it can do everything DSVD does, only five to ten times faster. It’s fine for midband applications. You get rapid transmission of text and still pictures. Motion video can be transmitted, but the quality is mediocre—not good enough to watch a movie, but reasonable for routine videoconferencing. The full highway requires high-quality video.

Hundreds of Microsoft employees use ISDN every day to connect their home computers to our corporate network. ISDN was invented more than a decade ago, but without PC-application demand almost no one needed it. It’s amazing that phone companies invested enormous sums in switches to handle ISDN with very little idea of how it would be used. The good news is that the PC will drive explosive demand. An add-in card for a PC to support ISDN costs $500 in 1995, but the price should drop to less than $200 over the next few years. The line costs vary by location but are generally about $50 per month in the United States. I expect this will drop to less than $20, not much more than a regular phone connection. We are among companies working to convince phone companies all over the world to lower these charges in order to encourage PC owners to connect, using ISDN.

Cable companies have interim technologies and strategies of their own. They want to use their existing coaxial cable networks to compete with the phone companies to provide local telephone service. They have also already demonstrated that special cable modems can connect personal computers to cable networks. This allows cable companies to offer bandwidth somewhat greater than ISDN’s.

For cable companies another interim step will be to increase the number of broadcast channels they carry five- to tenfold. They’ll do it by using digital-compression technology to squeeze more channels onto existing cables.

This so-called 500-channel approach—which often will really only have 150 channels—makes possible near-video-on-demand, although only for a limited number of television shows and movies. You would choose from a list on-screen rather than selecting a numbered channel. A popular movie might run on twenty of the channels, with the starting time staggered at five-minute intervals so that you could begin watching it within five minutes of whenever you wanted. You would choose from among the available starting times for movies and television programs, and the set-top box would switch to the appropriate channel. The half-hour-long CNN Headline News might be offered on six channels instead of one, with the 6:00 P.M. broadcast shown again at 6:05, 6:10, 6:15, 6:20, and 6:25. There would be a new, live broadcast every half hour, just as there is now. Five hundred channels will get used up pretty fast this way.

The cable companies are under pressure to add channels partly as a reaction to competition. Direct-broadcast satellites such as Hughes Electronics’ DIRECTV are already beaming hundreds of channels directly into homes. Cable companies want to increase their channel lineup rapidly to avoid losing customers. If the only reason for the information highway were to deliver a limited number of movies, then a 500-channel system would be adequate.

A 500-channel system will still be mostly synchronous, will limit your choices, and will provide only a low-bandwidth back channel, at best. A “back channel” is an information path dedicated to carrying instructions and other information from a consumer’s information appliance back up the cable to the network. A back channel on a 500-channel system might let you use your television set-top box to order products or programs, respond to polls or game-show questions, and participate in certain kinds of multiplayer games. But a low-bandwidth back channel can’t offer the full flexibility and interactivity the most interesting applications will require. It won’t let you send a video of your children to their grandparents, or play truly interactive games.

Cable and phone companies around the world will progress along four parallel paths. First, each will be going after the others’ business. Cable companies will offer telephone service, and phone companies will offer video services, including television. Second, both systems will be providing better ways to connect PCs with either ISDN or cable modems. Third, both will be converting to digital technology in order to provide more television channels and higher-quality signals. Fourth, both will be conducting trials of broadband systems connected to television sets and PCs. Each of the four strategies will motivate investment in digital network capacity. There will be intense competition between the telephone companies and cable television networks to be the first network provider in a neighborhood.

Eventually, the Internet and the other transitional technologies will be subsumed within the real information highway. The highway will combine the best qualities of both the telephone and the cable network systems: Like the telephone network, it will offer private connections so that everyone using the network can pursue his or her own interests, on his or her own schedule. It will also be fully two-way like the telephone network, so that rich forms of interaction are possible. Like the cable television network, it will be high capacity, so there will be sufficient bandwidth to allow multiple televisions or personal computers in a single household to connect simultaneously to different video programs or sources of information.

Most of the wires connecting servers with one another, and with the neighborhoods of the world, will be made of incredibly clear fiber-optic cable, the “asphalt” of the information highway. All of the major long-distance trunk lines that carry telephone calls within the United States today use fiber, but the lines that connect our homes to these data thoroughfares are still copper wire. Telephone companies will replace the copper-wire, microwave, and satellite links in their networks with fiber-optic cable so they will have the bandwidth to carry enough bits to deliver high-quality video. Cable television companies will increase the amount of fiber they use. At the same time fiber is being deployed, telephone and cable companies will be incorporating new switches into their networks so that digital video signals and other information can be routed from any point to any other point. The costs of upgrading the existing networks to prepare for the highway will be less than a quarter of what they would be to run new wires into every home.

You can think of a fiber trunk as being like the foot-wide water main that carries water up your street. It doesn’t come directly to your house; instead, a smaller pipe at the curb connects the main to your home. At first, the fiber will probably run only to neighborhood distribution points and the signals will be carried from the neighborhood fiber on either the coaxial cable that brings you cable television or on the “twisted-pair” copper-wire connections that provide telephone service. Eventually, though, fiber connections may run directly into your home if you use lots of data.

Switches are the sophisticated computers that shunt streams of data from one track to another, like boxcars in a train yard. Millions of simultaneous streams of communications will flow on large networks, and no matter how many intermediate waypoints are required, all the different bits of information will have to be guided to their destinations, with an assurance they will arrive in the right places and on time. To grasp how big the task will be in the era of the information highway, imagine billions of boxcars that have to be routed along railroad tracks through vast systems of switches and arrive at their destinations on schedule. Because the cars are attached to one another, switchyards get clogged waiting for long, multicar trains to pass through. There would be fewer tie-ups if each boxcar could travel independently and find its own way through the switches, then reassemble as a train at the destination.

Information traversing the information highway will be broken up into tiny packets, and each packet will be routed independently through the network, the way individual automobiles navigate roads. When you order a movie, it will be broken into millions of tiny pieces, each one of which will find its way through the network to your television.

This routing of packets will be accomplished through the use of a communications protocol known as asynchronous transfer mode, or ATM (not to be confused with “automatic teller machine"). It will be one of the building blocks of the information highway. Phone companies around the world are already beginning to rely on ATM, because it takes great advantage of fiber’s amazing bandwidth. One strength of ATM is its ability to guarantee timely delivery of information. ATM breaks each digital stream into uniform packets, each of which contains 48 bytes of the information to be transported and 5 bytes of control information that allow the highway’s switches to route the packets very quickly to their destinations. At their destinations the packets are recombined into a stream.

ATM delivers streams of information at very high speeds—up to 155 million bits per second at first, later jumping to 622 million bits per second and eventually to 2 billion bits per second. This technology will make it possible to send video as easily as voice calls, and at very low cost. Just as advances in chip technology have driven down the cost of computing, ATM, because it will also be able to carry enormous numbers of old-fashioned voice calls, will drive down the cost of long-distance phone calls.

High-bandwidth cable connections will link most information appliances to the highway, but some devices will connect wirelessly. We already use a number of wireless communication devices—cellular telephones, pagers, and consumer-electronics remote controls. They send radio signals and allow us mobility, but the bandwidth is limited. The wireless networks of the future will be faster, but unless there is a major breakthrough, wired networks will have far greater bandwidth. Mobile devices will be able to send and receive messages, but it will be expensive and unusual to use them to receive an individual video stream.

The wireless networks that will allow us to communicate when we are mobile will grow out of today’s cellular-telephone systems and the new alternative wireless phone service, called PCS. When you are on the road and want information from your home or office computer, your portable information appliance will connect to the wireless part of the highway, a switch will connect that to the wired part, and then to the computer/server in your home or office and bring you the information you asked for.

There will also be local, less expensive kinds of wireless networks available inside businesses and most homes. These networks will allow you to connect to the highway or your own computer system without paying time charges so long as you are within a certain range. Local wireless networks will use technology different from the one used by the wide-area wireless networks. However, portable information devices will automatically select the least expensive network they are able to connect to, so the user won’t be aware of the technological differences. The indoor wireless networks will allow wallet PCs to be used in place of remote controls.

Wireless service poses obvious concerns about privacy and security, because radio signals can easily be intercepted. Even wired networks can be tapped. The highway software will have to encrypt transmission to avoid eavesdropping.

Governments have long understood the importance of keeping information private, for both economic and military reasons. The need to make personal, commercial, military, or diplomatic messages secure (or to break into them) has attracted powerful intellects through the generations. It is very satisfying to break an encoded message. Charles Babbage, who made dramatic advances in the art of code breaking in the mid-1800s, wrote: “Deciphering is, in my opinion, one of the most fascinating of arts, and I fear I have wasted upon it more time than it deserves.” I discovered its fascination as a kid when, like kids everywhere, a bunch of us played with simple ciphers. We would encode messages by substituting one letter of the alphabet for another. If a friend sent me a cipher that began “ULFW NZXX” it would be fairly easy to guess that this represented “DEAR BILL,” and that U stood for D, and L for E, and so forth. With those seven letters it wasn’t hard to unravel the rest of the cipher fairly quickly.

Past wars have been won or lost because the most powerful governments on earth didn’t have the cryptological power any interested junior high school student with a personal computer can harness today. Soon any child old enough to use a computer will be able to transmit encoded messages that no government on earth will find easy to decipher. This is one of the profound implications of the spread of fantastic computing power.

When you send a message across the information highway it will be “signed” by your computer or other information appliance with a digital signature that only you are capable of applying, and it will be encrypted so that only the intended recipient will be able to decipher it. You’ll send a message, which could be information of any kind, including voice, video, or digital money. The recipient will be able to be almost positive that the message is really from you, that it was sent at exactly the indicated time, that it has not been tampered with in the slightest, and that others cannot decipher it.

The mechanism that will make this possible is based on mathematical principles, including what are called “one-way functions” and “public-key encryption.” These are quite advanced concepts, so I’m only going to touch on them. Keep in mind that regardless of how complicated the system is technically, it will be extremely easy for you to use. You’ll just tell your information appliance what you want it to do and it will seem to happen effortlessly.

A one-way function is something that is much easier to do than undo. Breaking a pane of glass is a one-way function, but not one useful for encoding. The sort of one-way function required for cryptography is one that is easy to undo if you know an extra piece of information and very difficult to undo without that information. There are a number of such one-way functions in mathematics. One involves prime numbers. Kids learn about prime numbers in school. A prime number cannot be divided evenly by any number except 1 and itself. Among the first dozen numbers, the primes are 2, 3, 5, 7, and 11. The numbers 4, 6, 8, and 10 are not prime because 2 divides into each of them evenly. The number 9 is not prime because 3 divides into it evenly. There are an infinite number of prime numbers, and there is no known pattern to them except that they are prime. When you multiply two prime numbers together, you get a number that can be divided evenly only by those same two primes. For example, only 5 and 7 can be divided evenly into 35. Finding the primes is called “factoring” the number.

It is easy to multiply the prime numbers 11,927 and 20,903 and get the number 249,310,081, but it is much harder to recover from the product, 249,310,081, the two prime numbers that are its factors. This one-way function, the difficulty of factoring numbers, underlies an ingenious kind of cipher: the most sophisticated encryption system in use today. It takes a long time for even the largest computers to factor a really large product back into its constituent primes. A coding system based on factoring uses two different decoding keys, one to encipher a message and a different but related one to decipher. With only the enciphering key, it’s easy to encode a message, but deciphering it within any practical period of time is nearly impossible. Deciphering requires a separate key, available only to the intended recipient of the message—or, rather, to the recipient’s computer. The enciphering key is based on the product of two huge prime numbers, whereas the deciphering key is based on the primes themselves. A computer can generate a new pair of unique keys in a flash, because it is easy for a computer to generate two large prime numbers and multiply them together. The enciphering key thus created can be made public without appreciable risk, because of the difficulty even another computer would have factoring it to obtain the deciphering key.

The practical application of this encryption will be at the center of the information highway’s security system. The world will become quite reliant on this network, so it is important that security be handled competently. You can think of the information highway as a postal network where everyone has a mailbox that is impervious to tampering and has an unbreakable lock. Each mailbox has a slot that lets anyone slide information in, but only the owner of a mailbox has the key to get information out. (Some governments may insist that each mailbox have a second door with a separate key that the government keeps, but we’ll ignore that political consideration for now and concentrate on the security that software will provide.)

Each user’s computer or other information appliance will use prime numbers to generate an enciphering key, which will be listed publicly, and a corresponding deciphering key, which only the user will know. This is how it will work in practice: I have information I want to send you. My information appliance/computer system looks up your public key and uses it to encrypt the information before sending it. No one can read the message, even though your key is public knowledge, because your public key does not contain the information needed for decryption. You receive the message and your computer decrypts it with a private key that corresponds to your public key.

You want to answer. Your computer looks up my public key and uses it to encrypt your reply. No one else can read the message, even though it was encrypted with a key that is totally public. Only I can read it because only I have the private deciphering key. This is very practical, because no one has to trade keys in advance.

How big do the prime numbers and their products have to be to ensure an effective one-way function?.

The concept of public-key encryption was invented by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman in 1977. Another set of computer scientists, Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adelman, soon came up with the notion of using prime factorization as part of what is now known as the RSA cryptosystem, after the initials of their last names. They projected that it would take millions of years to factor a 130-digit number that was the product of two primes, regardless of how much computing power was brought to bear. To prove the point, they challenged the world to find the two factors in this 129-digit number, known to people in the field as RSA 129:

They were sure that a message they had encrypted using the number as the public key would be totally secure forever. But they hadn’t anticipated either the full effects of Moore’s Law, as discussed in chapter 2, which has made computers much more powerful, or the success of the personal computer, which has dramatically increased the number of computers and computer users in the world. In 1993 a group of more than 600 academics and hobbyists from around the world began an assault on the 129-digit number, using the Internet to coordinate the work of various computers. In less than a year they factored the number into two primes, one 64 digits long and the other 65. The primes are as follows:

and

And the encoded message says: “The magic words are squeamish and ossifrage.”

One lesson that came out of this challenge is that a 129-digit public key is not long enough if the information being encrypted is really important and sensitive. Another is that no one should get too cocksure about the security of encryption.

Increasing the key just a few digits makes it much more difficult to crack. Mathematicians today believe that a 250-digit-long product of two primes would take millions of years to factor with any foreseeable amount of future computing power. But who really knows. This uncertainty—and the unlikely but conceivable possibility that someone could come up with an easy way of factoring big numbers—means that a software platform for the information highway will have to be designed in such a way that its encryption scheme can be changed readily.

One thing we don’t have to worry about is running out of prime numbers, or the prospect of two computers’ accidentally using the same numbers as keys. There are far more prime numbers of appropriate length than there are atoms in the universe, so the chance of an accidental duplication is vanishingly small.

Key encryption allows more than just privacy. It can also assure the authenticity of a document because a private key can be used to encode a message that only the public key can decode. It works like this: If I have information I want to sign before sending it to you, my computer uses my private key to encipher it. Now the message can be read only if my public key—which you and everyone else knows—is used to decipher it. This message is verifiably from me, because no one else has the private key that could have encrypted it in this way.

My computer takes this enciphered message and enciphers it again, this time using your public key. Then it sends this double-coded message to you across the information highway.

Your computer receives the message and uses your private key to decipher it. This removes the second level of encoding but leaves the level I applied with my private key. Then your computer uses my public key to decipher the message again. Because it really is from me, the message deciphers correctly and you know it is authentic. If even one bit of information was changed, the message would not decode properly and the tampering or communications error would be apparent. This extraordinary security will enable you to transact business with strangers or even people you distrust, because you’ll be able to be sure that digital money is valid and signatures and documents are provably authentic.

Security can be increased further by having time stamps incorporated into encrypted messages. If anyone tries to tinker with the time that a document supposedly was written or sent, the tinkering will be detectable. This will rehabilitate the evidentiary value of photographs and videos, which has been under assault because digital retouching has become so easy to do.

My description of public-key encryption oversimplifies the technical details of the system. For one thing, because it is relatively slow, it will not be the only form of encipherment used on the highway. But public-key encryption will be the way that documents are signed, authenticity is established, and the keys to other kinds of encryption are distributed securely.

The major benefit of the PC revolution has been the way it has empowered people. The highway’s low-cost communications will empower in an even more fundamental way. The beneficiaries won’t just be technology-oriented individuals. As more and more computers are connected to high-bandwidth networks, and as software platforms provide a foundation for great applications, everyone will have access to most of the world’s information.