Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!milano!titan!janssen@titan.sw.mcc.com
From: janssen@titan.sw.mcc.com (Bill Janssen)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: Re: Electronic Newspapers
Message-ID: <2329@titan.sw.mcc.com>
Date: 10 May 89 00:35:24 GMT
References: <8905031352.AA16555@mica.berkeley.edu> <174@marvin.moncam.co.uk>
Sender: janssen@titan.sw.mcc.com
Reply-To: janssen@titan.sw.mcc.com (Bill Janssen)
Organization: MCC Software Technology
Lines: 33
In-reply-to: harry@moncam.co.uk (Jangling Neck Nipper)

In article <174@marvin.moncam.co.uk>, harry@moncam (Jangling Neck Nipper) writes:
>Are we talking about news over the 'phone, or having the newspaper deliverer 
>chuck us a ROM thro' the letterbox?

This is a fascinating question, one of the two that are still unsolved.
Suppose you attempt to publish a city newspaper with 50,000 subscribers,
each subscriber having his own profile, so that each receives a personalized
newspaper.

Option 1:  modem transmission over voice lines.
  Suppose that you can transmit their copy to them over a 9600 baud
modem to their computer, and that an issue has a megabyte of text.  Suppose
you can get 700 bytes per second of transmission, after encoding.  This
yields a time of 19841 hours of transmission time.  Suppose that you can
transmit over an 8-hour period, and that 20% of your time is taken up with
dialing and other trivia that requires the use of a modem and phone line.
This requires the use of 2977 phone lines and modems.  How much does that
cost?

Option 2:  optical fiber phone line transmission.
  People at Bellcore have been telling me that if they could only get someone
else to pay for it, the operating companies would be glad to lay a 100Mbit
fiber thread to my door.  Suppose we had that in place, probably 10 to 15
years from now.  Suddenly we can transmit at (say) 4 Mbyte per second, if
our home computer can catch that fast (and in 10 years they'll be able to).

Option 3:  continuous transmission over cable.
  Suppose we transmit everything (the entire newspaper data base) 24 hours
a day over cable TV, and let the home computer do the processing.  How do
we protect the data that the consumer isn't paying for?  Can a PC/AT really
process a newspaper?

Bill