Sprint’s announcement last week of its proposed new broadband-over-copper-wires services got the kind of media play that press agents dream of. “Sprint unveils leap in service” was a typical headline about Sprint’s plan to offer simultaneous voice, video calls and data services on a single phone line.
And while Sprint said its breakthrough came after “five years of confidential work,” other players in the telecommunications industry have been developing similar products based on the core technology Sprint is using, called Asynchronous Transfer Mode, or ATM. And much to the chagrin of Sprint’s competitors, when these products roll out the jaded press will doubtless dismiss them as been-there-done-that stuff.
There is a real breakthrough here anyway, and it may well give telephone companies an edge over the cable television industry, which seemed poised to eat the telcos’ lunch by providing fast Internet service to the home.
The key to a useful Internet experience is, of course, downloading complex images quickly. The cable companies have spent billions of dollars running fiber-optic cable to homes all over America, and it looked like the huge carrying capacity of the cables could do in the phone companies and their old copper wires.
In reality, existing telephone wires have enough bandwidth to carry a lot more data than phone conversations demand, but because phone systems use the circuit switching method of transmitting data that capacity has been wasted. Circuit switching, the traditional voice communication technique, requires the dedication of a particular transmission path for the duration of the connection.
Packet-switching technology–used in ATM, the Internet and digital cellular service–breaks up every transmission into little pieces and squirts them through the network wherever minuscule openings may occur.
Each ATM packet is a 53-byte cell containing 48 bytes of data. The other 5 bytes contain an identifying header so all the pieces can be put back together in the right order at the end of the journey.
The cost of installing new switches that can handle the new protocol is not trivial, and the situation is complicated by the fact that Sprint and other national players will get no help from the local phone companies they are trying to put out of business.
Offering solutions: Big Blue wants you to know it thinks small, too. IBM is partnering with the Small Business Administration and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to help owners of small businesses make the best use of technology.
“People think IBM focuses on the Fortune 500, but we’ve always provided solutions to small business,” said Steve Isaacs, IBM Small Business Solutions manager.
Now IBM is trying to whet the appetite for those solutions by giving some of them away. Or a taste of them, anyway.
Within 60 days, the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce will set up and staff a “ThinkCenter,” sort of a grown-ups computer lab with IBM PCs, a network server and software from various vendors. Owners of small businesses will be able to get hands-on experience, find answers to technical questions and get referrals to technology specialists, consultants and vendors.
Other parts of the program include small business Web sites, toll-free helplines and free videos.
Why is IBM thinking small? Because the revenues can be big. “Small businesses (with under 100 employees) employ 47 percent of the American workforce,” Isaacs said, and “the small business marketplace is growing twice as fast as the large market.”
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Control your game: Basketball junkies can use the Internet to augment TV with personally selected real-time still images from the NBA Finals.
Evanston-based Perceptual Robotics Inc. has eight cameras mounted at the Delta Center and United Center during the Bulls-Jazz series and will allow fans to control them by visiting a designated section of the NBA’s Web site, www.nba.com.
Users can click on commands to pick a camera and pan, tilt or zoom as desired.
“We feel it’s enhancing the TV experience,” said Perceptual Robotics’ Kevin Convery. “You are the producer, you control the experience.”
Anybody with an Internet link and at least a 14.4 baud modem can use the service, which also can be accessed from www.perceptualrobotics.com.
Control the fans: The Chicago Police Department is using technology to keep ahead of Bulls fans, too. Well, actually it’s riot fans they’re after. Just before last year’s celebration of the Bulls’ championship, the CPD added specialized mapping technology to its crime-fighting arsenal.
The system, created by MapInfo Corp. of Troy, N.Y., replaced a tried and untrue pastiche of paper maps and Post-It notes used by police commanders to try to get a handle on city hot spots at high-crime times.
The mapping comes into play as calls come in to the 911 Command Center. Twelve types of incidents–shots fired, looting, police officers injured, etc.–are monitored and icons for each appear on an electronic map of the city. Commanders can see at a glance how a pattern is developing and deploy their forces accordingly.
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MORE ON THE INTERNET: Read previous “Inside Technology” columns at chicago.tribune.com/
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