By Bill Steele
Ithaca has an opportunity to lead the world into a new era in communications, both in technology and in the way the technology is used, according to some of the many Cornellians who participated in the second annual Ithacanet conference Saturday, March 16.
The conference, sponsored by a loose-knit coalition of people trying to encourage the growth of computer communications in Ithaca and Tompkins County, drew about 300 people to Phillips Hall at Ithaca College.
The first Ithacanet conference a year ago was devoted to showing off the possibilities of computer networking. Partly as a result, Ithaca now has three private companies offering Internet access, and at least 100 local businesses have home pages on the World Wide Web. This year's conference, titled "Spreading the Net," focused on ways to get more people online and on what to do with the new capabilities.
First, we need a vast improvement in the way people are connected to the system, said H. David Lambert, Cornell's vice president for information technologies. "The current communications infrastructure will strangle the future," Lambert said. The telephone system, he pointed out, is outmoded, because it "won't scale." In the future, he explained, voice, video and data communications will all be carried over a single digital network.
This change will easily pay for itself, he added. "At Cornell we spend four times as much on telephony as on data, and the data network is much higher bandwidth." That is, it carries much more information. Cornell will soon phase out its telephone system and shift voice communications to the data network. Making a similar change in the larger community, Lambert said, will save enough "to pay for delivery of telephone, video and data into every home."
"Both history and technology present Ithaca with the opportunity to be the first city of the 21st century," said David Lytel of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, in the keynote address. Lytel, a former Ithaca city alderman, received his Ph.D. in government at Cornell.
Computer networking, he said, allows direct access to government information, rather than having that information filtered through private agencies. Lytel created the White House Web page at <http://www.whitehouse.gov>, which he has made into a gateway to a wide variety of information from government agencies.
Eventually he envisions a service he calls the "Govbot."
"Ask a question of the government, and if the answer is on a Web page somewhere you can get an answer," he said.
In an afternoon session, Richard Cogger, assistant director for advanced technology planning for Cornell Information Technologies and a member of the Ithaca Cable Commission, showed how the local television cable system can provide high-speed Internet access to homes and businesses.
Eventually, Cogger said, fiber-optic cable will need to be run to every site; but for the next 10 years or so, a transition system called hybrid fiber-coax, or HFC, could be used. In this system, the cable company would run fiber-optic cable to neighborhood distribution boxes, each of which will serve about 500 homes. From there, the existing coaxial cable will carry the signal to each house. In the house, the user would connect a desktop computer to the system via a "cable modem." This would give home users a connection at speeds similar to those enjoyed by users on the Cornell campus.