THE Big Bang that created the Universe is being replicated in Earth's little universe by a Big Bang reshaping world communications. The speed is awesome. Unanticipated random effects are certain. The Big Bang in
(First of four columns)
world communicationsI set out to write about what it can mean to Hawaii's future and was overwhelmed in no time. But I'm taking a stab at it in this and three subsequent columns.
A good starting place is Singapore, an island nation of 3 million people. It has committed to have fiber-optic cable in all its homes and businesses by 2000. Since it's Singapore it probably will happen.
Let me tell you what that means: The capacity of the fiber-optic wires feeding all of Singapore will be over 50,000,000,000 bits of information per second, two-directional to every station. Our telephones in Hawaii operate on only 9,600 bits of information per second, but have twisted wires capable of handling 54,000. Cable TV in Hawaii has a fiber-optic network that matches Singapore but connects off the network into most of our homes on co-axial cables rated at 360,000,000.
The world now is girdled by these fantastic capacities with satellites filling in where fiber-optic hasn't yet gone. A receiver/transmitter so small as to be hand-held can connect to anywhere even from a small boat in the ocean or a hiker in the middle of a desert.
Now let me bring it back home. In 1987 a whiz kid senior at Kapaa High on Kauai chose a math problem for a science fair. It was too complicated to work out on his home PC (personal computer), too complicated to work out on the Kauai Community College computer, and too challenging for the mainframe at University of Hawaii-Manoa. With the help of educators all along the way, he finally hooked into a supercomputer at San Diego State, worked out his equations, and won the state science fair prize in math. He went on to national and world second places. It was all done by wire, all done from his home at Kapaa. His name is Oleg Urminsky. He won a scholarship to Princeton and now is doing graduate studies at New York University while he works for a statistics company.
When all the world is wired like Singapore, WOW!
Hawaii is lucky to have had a bright-eyed enthusiastic state senator, Carol Fukunaga, sit as one of 36 members of a U.S. Advisory Council on the National Information Infrastructure Inc. that made its final report at the White House a year ago. She was the only state legislator on the council. In the less than two years that they met, she said, she saw captains of industry and leaders in communications themselves become bug-eyed over the vast potential out there. A key recommendation is that every community in America connect its elementary and secondary schools to the world-girdling Internet. Hawaii is cited as the leader in this and a demonstrator that it can be done affordably for a small portion of the education budget. More on that in Column No. 3 in this series.
Fukunaga and Senators David Ige and Les Ihara are a triumvirate that started together in the House of Representatives 10 years ago to wake Hawaii's government up to the potential of telecom. They now have graduated to the Senate.
MEHEROO Jussawalla is an emeritus research fellow at the East-West Center. She has kept her eye on what is happening in Asia and helped to influence it with her writings.
She woke me up at a breakfast meeting a few months ago with color slides showing the networks already embracing the Pacific and Asia and others to come. They include low-level satellite necklaces around the world that will further expand capacity and make it cheaper. She disabused all of us of any idea that the U.S. stands alone in taking advantage of these great opportunities. On her maps Hawaii looked very small and insignificant. Is there a place for us? More on that in my next article.