CHAPTER 6 Networks and Networking: Linking the World
Our Increasingly Wired Society
The U.S. Education Department reports that two-thirds of all classrooms and 90 percent of all libraries in the United States are now linked to the Internet.To put this in perspective, consider that it took decades for this kind of penetration for the telephone.
Hyperspeed Communications Links
Lucent's Bell Labs has set a world communications channel speed record. The scientists were able to transmit data over a special fiber-optic cable at 3.28 terabits per second. The transmission, however, was over a distance of only a city block. To put this into perspective the company's new type of fiber-optic cable can transmit the equivalent of 3 days worth of Internet traffic (worldwide) in a single second! Of course, this technology is still in the laboratory but we may well have this capability in the near future, giving companies and those of us at home a very big "pipe" through which to receive information.