There are many different plans for the technical standards on which the NII will be built. One of the primary issues in question is "bandwidth". The term "bandwidth" is used to describe the amount of signal that a given conduit (like a fiber optic cable or standard telephone wire) may carry. Services such as full motion video require high bandwidth whereas services like simple voice or data communications require much less. The cable television industry sees itself as being better prepared to provide high bandwidth services than any other sector of the communications industry. No current communications infrastructure is truly capable of delivering fully interactive video services but the cable industry believes that it has the quickest most satisfactory solution to this problem.
Us. We're the guys building it. We've got 35 percent of the country done right now. By the end of this year, we'll be 55 percent done. And by the end of '96, we'll be completely done in terms of fiber and coaxed deployment -- the terrestrial network that is the superhighway.- John Malone in an interview in Wired Magazine. - registration required for this site
The Cable industry is presently upgrading it's current coaxial cable system with fiber optic "trunk lines" that will be able to carry extremely high bandwidth signals to local areas where they will then be delivered to the home via the existing coaxial cable system (CableLabs whitepaper). At the headwaters of this system will be complex computer server technology capable of delivering video signals on demand. In the home these signals will be decoded by what is being called the "set top box" a device that will most probably be something of a cross between a cable converter box and a computer controlled by a hand held remote. The standards for the set top box are far from confirmed but many major hardware and software manufacturers like Microsoft, Silicon Graphics, Oracle, and IBM are already testing them.
The first implementation of this system will be primarily one way much like today's current cable television with limited "upstream" capabilities for ordering and navigating programming. There are plans however to ultimately upgrade this system to allow for true bi-directional communication particularly through the integration of cable and computer technology. The industry has already begun several efforts in collaboration with the information technology industry such as The Cable/IT (Information Technology) Convergence Forum.
