Time magazine carries and intriguing story about the emergence of Twitter as a new communications tool. It lauds the service as providing more evidence of the innovativeness of the U. S. economy pointing to the emergence of a host of online services and applications such as Facebook, Google, Blogger and Wikipedia as evidence that the U. S. remains one of the most innovative countries in the world.
I think an untold part of this story however is role broadband deployment and connectivity played in the process. Recall AOL in its heyday. People were introduced to online services, email and Instant Messaging through AOL but the use of dial up access led to some real limitations that stifled the emergence of rapid innovation online. Why?
First, with dial up, users could not become a part of the Internet in any real sense. You could not leave a dial up connection “nailed up” as they used to say because the technology used up lots of capacity and caused congestion on voice networks. Voice remained the most important application for most people and dial up connections used the capacity of an entire copper line going to a home. People typically dialed in, checked their email, looked for some content checking a few popular content sites, and then disconnected.
Broadband technology (cable modem and ADSL initially) allowed people to connect to the Internet and stay connected all day if they wished. Computers became true “nodes” on the Internet and people became more integrated with the online world and with the content that was out there.
Second, capacity broadband capacity began to expand as I explained in an earlier blog post. Two-way communications of all kinds – voice, video, text – became common place on the Internet. Consumers became “prosumers” to use an Alvin Toffler phrase. They not only consumed content, they often created it.
Finally, the decline in the real price of PCs and the rapid deployment of broadband led to rapid growth in the number of consumers connected to the online world.
I was involved in the evolution and emergence of these broadband networks when I worked at Bell Atlantic. The company experimented with the use of ADSL to connect consumers to the much touted “Information Superhighway” which in those days was not really the Web but rather access to online video content. Bell Atlantic successfully trialed ADSL for on demand video but recognized as the trials went on that ADSL was better suited to accessing what became the true “Information Superhighway” – the World Wide Web.
As cable companies and telcos began to deploy broadband in the latter part of the 1990’s, online applications began to grow and emerge. Early efforts to stimulate the use of web sites included companies like NBC which had one of the very first news sites that incorporated the use of video news clips. I remember this initiative and recall that after a year of offering the “iNBC’ web news service, NBC withdrew it. One of the points it made in doing so was that without a “mass market” broadband market, interactive and video online services were not viable. This was in the late 1990’s.
Just a few years later, broadband was used by a quarter of all homes on a rapid growth path upwards. As penetration rates grew, so did the emergence of online services like Facebook (2004) and the mass use of services like Instant Messaging. The “always on” character of broadband, its growing capacity in both directions and the rapid increase in uptake helped provide a platform for the emergence of more innovation in the form of new online services.
Broadband is not only a platform for innovation, it also represents innovation in many ways. The deployment of fiber by Verizon, for example, has resulted in the development of many new patents for everything from fiber connectors to “bendable” fiber lines. Speed itself – as with PCs and processors – is a form of innovation.
While we take for granted today the emergence of new innovations like Twitter, without broadband, the evolution of these new online services and applications would be far different.
By the way, I am an active user of Twitter too and would welcome feedback there if you’d like. I’m at “linkhoe” on Twitter.