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