Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, August 1, 1994                   TAG: 9408010011
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A7   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: LEONARD KLEINROCK
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

INFORMATION HIGHWAY

Unfortunately, it's not quite that simple. Many different industries are vying to build the information highway, and each has a different vision of its future. The entertainment and cable TV industries see vast sums of money to be made in delivering movies, games and home shopping to our living rooms, but those industries are less familiar with interactive services in which information flows two ways.

The telephone and utility industries want to sell videophones and sophisticated home-monitoring systems to consumers, but they don't have much experience with the entertainment services that will largely bankroll a network.

Without incentives for the private sector to build a single network that can support all kinds of services, we're likely to end up not with an information highway but with several information byways, each functioning in relative isolation.

If that happens a great opportunity will be lost. New technologies have a truly dazzling potential to integrate communications. Within a decade, a single connection from the street could link your television, your computer, your telephone and your stereo to the outside world. Sitting at home, you could peruse a book from a distant library, send home videotapes to relatives, take a course from a local university or community college, sell a new information service you had developed, or discuss almost any subject imaginable with people from around the world who share your interests.

The potential is even greater for a part of our society that desperately needs help - our elementary and secondary schools. In the handful of schools that today are connected to computer networks, unmotivated students are being inspired, teachers are networking to share ideas and resources, and new ways of learning are taking root. Yet most schools are far too strapped for funds to take advantage of new information technologies.

Private companies are beginning to network selected communities with limited capabilities. As they do, the technical characteristics of the system are being set - and once set, those characteristics will be hard to change.

What's needed, in technical terms, is an open data network. In practical terms, this means the system should meet four criteria:

It should be open to all users. Like the telephone system, the network should permit anyone to connect with and send all kinds of information to anyone else.

It should be open to all service providers. Today, many firms, such as cable TV or paging companies, build closed systems that limit what their customers can do. On the information highway, people should have access to different and competing service providers and should be able to switch among them with ease.

It should be open to all network providers. When a communications network - an electronic town hall, for example - wants to connect with the larger system, it should be able to do so easily.

It should be open to change. As new applications, services and technologies (like wireless personal-communications devices) are developed, they should be able to merge smoothly into the existing system.

Private companies will probably not build open systems on their own. Government and consumer groups need to find ways to foster the openness that will bring broad, long-term benefits while maintaining industry's incentives to invest and deliver services sooner rather than later.

The federal government can help by balancing competing interests and by supporting the development of industrywide standards. President Clinton and Vice President Gore are spearheading the development of a National Information Infrastructure that will serve as the backbone of the information highway. The government should adopt the open data network as the technical framework for the system.

1994 is shaping up as a critical year for the information highway. Major decisions are being made about how the system will be designed, built and run. If we are to have a system that will serve the broadest range of interest, we need to build openness into the system from the beginning.

Leonard Kleinrock is head of the computer science department at the University of California, Los Angeles.