City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics

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Hi-OVIS had other weaknesses as well. While the tests showed what services
people used, subscribers didn’t have to pay the bills. In addition, telephone
service was missing because Nippon Telegraph and Telephone would not yield
its franchise. NTT and MITI were allied with rival bureaucracies in the Japanese
government. Looking back, Kawahata points with pride to creating a
sense of community among subscribers and fueling growth of Japan’s fiberoptics
industry, which has become a global powerhouse. He also claims credit
for laying the groundwork that led NTT in 1990 to set stringing fiber to every
Japanese home and business by 2015 as a long-term goal. 18
However, NTT usually avoids mentioning Hi-OVIS, and has since backed
away from that goal, which a top official said later was ‘‘not a business plan
or an implementation schedule, just a wish list.’’ 19 As of late 1997, NTT
planned to install fiber-optic feeder cables to remote terminals near homes by
2010. With that network completed, the company says it ‘‘will be able to lay
optical fiber to the home within a week or so.’’ 20
Fiber to the Farm: The Elie System
I never got to Hi-OVIS, but I did see the next trial of fiber-optic links to the
home, in rural Canada. Canada wanted to enhance the quality of life on the
big, productive farms that sprawl across the prairie. Farming is a major Canadian
industry, but the best and brightest young people tend to leave rural
areas. Canada’s Department of Communications decided to test fibers for telephone,
television, and data transmission in the tiny towns of Elie and Ste.
Eustache about 50 kilometers (30 miles) west of Winnipeg. 21
Elie was a little town, with small homes and a huge railside grain elevator
that towered over the flattest landscape I have ever seen. Ste. Eustache was
smaller, but had more trees and seemed less stark. They were places that
desperately needed better communications. Party phones serving up to ten
households were standard, so one call could tie up many other lines. Television
was the four channels that tall antennas could pick up from Winnipeg.
In the winter, temperatures hit 40 below, the point at which the Centigrade
and Fahrenheit scales match and exposed skin freezes. The harsh weather
outside would test the hardware; the people inside would test the services.
The Department of Communications and Manitoba Telephone teamed with
Northern Telecom on a prototype system serving 150 homes, a third in the
country and the rest in the two towns. They budgeted $7.5 million, about
$50,000 per home, cheap compared to Hi-OVIS. 22 Steady technical advances
gave Elie better fiber hardware than was available for Hi-OVIS. Service began
in late 1981, and when I visited the following June, residents were still delighted
with private phone lines. They also liked American television channels
brought to their homes for the first time, somewhat to the annoyance of
Canadian officials. The fibers also connected them to Canada’s developmental
videotex system. Think of it as a primitive, extremely limited version of the
Internet accessed through an extremely slow modem and an antiquated com-