The why of tech
The why of tech
By now you've seen the ads. There's the guy who walks into the town where the folks talk in static. He quickly solves the problems by offering digital phones so the townspeople can communicate again. Locally, for four more bucks per month the cable company will let you "upgrade" to digital cable. Buying into Digital
now offers payoffs
down the roadWhy are all these companies trying to sign us up to pay for digital services? What's the matter with the old stuff? Here's the big secret: nothing. Currently, analog cell phones sound better, and analog cable has better resolution then the digital counterparts. And on top of that, the carriers can carry more digital traffic than analog traffic using the same infrastructure. The naked truth is these service providers are trying to get you to pay more for an inferior product that costs them less to provide.
But before you start canceling your accounts or yelling at some poor person in customer service, know this: Digital services hold incomparable potential and the sooner you sign up, the sooner it will come.
For reasons too be explained in later columns, digital information (zeros and ones), is vastly superior to analog information (light and sound waves). One of the biggest reasons, is analog networks can only send one type of information. For example, one can only send sounds over the telephone. That's why the phone company and the cable company are two separate, seemingly non-competing entities in every household.
The genius of digital is that ALL information can be broken down into zeros and ones. That means voice, sound, images, text and anything else you can imagine can all be distributed on the same network. In the future, one company will provide you with all your services: cable, Internet and phone.
By signing up for digital services now, you are helping these companies build their digital networks. The advantage for you will be mind-boggling. Virtually any type of information you can think of can be sent straight to your house. Talking to relatives, renting movies, buying music, newspapers and books can all be done over the network.
But there are shortcomings with these pioneering digital networks. For one, the resolution (picture quality or voice quality) is generally inferior to analog counterparts. Everyone has heard how the digital cell phone makes you sound like you are talking in a bathroom stall, and for those of you with digital cable, take a look a the nighttime scenes: you'll notice the details in the shadows are poor.
In order for digital to beat out analog, two things will have to happen: networks that send the information will have to get faster; and the devices that reassemble the zeros and ones into forms humans can relate with will have to get quicker.
Most importantly, the current digital efforts will have to generate enough revenues to not only justify their existence, but create profits for future improvements.
Steve Jefferson is a Honolulu-based freelance writer
and section editor for InfoWorld. He can be
reached at: stevej@lava.net