City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics

220 CITY OF LIGHT
transmission distance, so it paid the premium for graded-index fibers. Hi-OVIS
wanted to minimize connection costs, and they could get away with largecore
multimode fibers, despite their large pulse spreading, because the home
links were short. 12
Video services went well beyond the usual retransmission of local television
broadcasts. Hi-OVIS had its own programming center; homes had their own
cameras and transmitters so residents could join in. The Japanese planners’
standard example was having women demonstrate how they made their favorite
recipes in their own kitchens. Other services included displaying information
from computer files, such as weather forecasts, news highlights, or
train timetables. A video-on-demand service let viewers request programs
from the Hi-OVIS central library. 13
As Japan built, Canada, Britain, France, and Germany planned their own
home fiber trials. The American telecommunications establishment dithered,
blocked by government regulations, the cable industry’s limited capital, and
the phone industry’s timidity. In July 1978, the Visual Information System
Development Association turned on Hi-OVIS. I watched from afar, fascinated
by the experiment and worried America was falling behind.
Program director Masahiro Kawahata made Hi-OVIS a showcase, hosting
a series of overseas visitors. Early results seemed good. The hardware worked,
although it was primitive by modern standards. People used the system, although
most were shy about getting in front of the camera, particularly the
women. Children learned the system quickly and requested some programs
over 500 times from the central library, literally wearing out the tapes. 14 Hi-
OVIS officials apparently did not consider the children’s choices wholesome
enough, so they did not replace the worn-out tapes.
Carefully reading an English-language preliminary report on Hi-OVIS, I
thought I saw the future of fiber to the home. The children of Higashi-Ikoma
wanted to pick their own programs, and it was only logical to think adults
would do the same. I envisioned a future where switched fiber networks
would retrieve programs from on-line video libraries. I decided video-ondemand
service could be the ‘‘killer application’’ that would pay for the new
technology. It was clear video telephones wouldn’t do the trick; Picturephone
had crashed and burned. Videotex and similar home information services
were struggling. I tried to stake my claim as a minor visionary with a talk at
a fiber-marketing conference and an editorial in Laser Focus. 15
In one sense I was right. The videotape market proves that people want
to pick their own programs—but I expected them to select from on-line video
libraries, not by renting tapes. Yet my forecast missed the mark because I did
not realize the discouragingly high costs of both on-line video libraries and
home fiber-optic networks. Hi-OVIS proved extremely expensive. The Japanese
didn’t talk much about their expenses at the time, but afterward Kawahata
said they totaled about 10 billion yen, roughly $80 million, through the end
of the experiment in early 1986. 16 That comes to a staggering $500,000 per
household served! The fiber-optic hardware was expensive, but the steepest
bills came from building and staffing the local operations center. 17