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From: linc@tongue1.berkeley.edu (Linc Madison)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Wondering About Gulf Crisis Coverage
Message-ID: <16147@accuvax.nwu.edu>
Date: 17 Jan 91 12:05:10 GMT
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X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 11, Issue 45, Message 2 of 10


I, like most of the country, spent much of the last twelve hours glued
to my television set.  My local NBC affiliate, KRON-TV, is also
affiliated with CNN, so they were switching back and forth between the
two.  I noticed several differences in the coverage from Baghdad.  Of
course, no video was going out live from Baghdad, but these two
networks were giving audio coverage.

NBC's audio was clearly just a plain telephone connection, with all
the bandwidth limitations that implies.  CNN's audio, though, sounded
much clearer.  Further, at one point NBC lost the phone connection and
didn't regain it for some time, but CNN maintained its hookup and even
piped it to NBC (at a cost that Tom Brokaw had to effusively speak of
how wonderful CNN is).  Brokaw, in fact, asked CNN how they did it,
and the reporter was quite secretive.

So how did they do it?  My initial guess was some sort of multiplexed
multiple phone lines, but it seems that all regular phone lines from
Baghdad were disrupted.  Any ideas?

Of course, I hope that this experiment in telecommunications in crisis
situations is as short-lived as possible.


Linc Madison  =  linc@tongue1.berkeley.edu

P.S. Plea to other contributors: *please* include your e-mail address in
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