Fiber-optics Quotes
At the time, the few private companies that provided American Internet service did not want to increase the bandwidth speeds to homes. Those businesses who needed more bandwidth paid dearly for it, but consumers could not afford those rates. With fiber optics, it cost no more to provide higher bandwidth than lower. But then the Internet providers would not be able to make the huge profit margins on the corporate accounts. In much of Europe, however, the Government rules and regulations required a higher standard of performance for the public in general. In the US, the Government did not want to regulate the performance standards of the private sector with respect to the Internet. Clinton argued that the problem should be solved by the private sector, but if they could or did not, he argued that government should set the rules to solve the problem. The software and hardware companies were driving American digital technology forward, but the few communications company were working to maintain the status quo on bandwidth.
This quotation illustrates a not uncommon problem of scientists trying to explain to sophisticated businessmen or politicians new ideas in science. They have no training in trying to separate the possible from the crackpot ideas or how to take an assertion and ask for the right kinds of evidence to test it. It is probably one of the mosot difficult problems for a politician in assessing new scientific and technological ideas. In this particular case, today we all know that glass fiber can carry an immense amount of digital information, but at the time it was as foreign and idea as if someone said that we can send electricity through the air to light bulbs with no wires. Yet that is just what some scientists have shown was possible recently. Most new science appears impossible and like magic. See {368568}.
