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Network management Toolkit

Broadband fulfilling its promise

John Borland and Jim Hu CNET News.com

Published: 27 Jul 2004 11:50 BST

In a small military hospital in Guam, a cardiac patient lay unconscious as a catheter was slid carefully into the right chamber of his heart.

The surgery was fairly routine, save for one notable absence: the physician in charge wasn't in the operating room during the procedure. In fact, he wasn't even on the island.

Dr. Benjamin Berg supervised the entire surgery while in front of a computer screen 3,500 miles away at Tripler Army Medical Centre in Honolulu. He dictated the procedure to the less-experienced colleague who performed the operation, monitoring every move with a high-resolution video camera while getting instant sensor data from the catheter itself.

"The real-time information requires a continuous broadband connection," Berg said. "The delay in the transmission of data about pressure inside the heart would be unacceptable."

The delicate process illustrates why high-speed Internet access -- once considered a luxury -- is viewed increasingly as a necessity. Broadband is being used in projects that could revolutionise such critical areas as education, health care and public safety while creating enormous opportunities in business and entertainment.

Realising that potential, however, has been a perennially elusive goal. To date, Internet development has been marked by extremes: although the nation has a glut of "backbone" bandwidth that can move data from coast to coast in an instant, these high-speed networks slow to a relative crawl at the infamous juncture known within the industry as "the last mile" -- the local connections that link ordinary homes and businesses to the Internet.

The transportation metaphor is apt, as policymakers are recognising that fast Internet connections are as essential to the future of the economy now as railroads and highways were in the last two centuries. Those systems transformed the way people lived and worked, irrevocably changing human conceptions of distance, speed and time. Even in its relative infancy, broadband is already having much the same effect.

So important is the technology that it has been elevated to a national campaign issue this US election year. President Bush and Democratic challenger John Kerry have each outlined plans to increase investment in the technology as part of their platform agendas, and policymakers of all stripes cite it as an important driver of future economic growth.

"If the United States is going to maintain its ability to grow its economy, I think the continued proliferation of broadband technologies is key to that solution," Federal Communications Commission chairman Michael Powell said in a speech in May. "This is the central communication policy objective of the era. It's more than talk now. It is time for action."

Critical uses for broadband technology are multiplying every day in a wide range of fields:

Public safety. Emergency services -- including firefighters, police forces and medical crews -- see wireless broadband as a vital addition to their tools, and are lobbying Congress to help improve these capabilities. Municipalities are experimenting with technologies that can speed emergency response times and help provide environmental data such as hazardous chemical readings.

Health care. "Telemedicine" has long been one of the most promising applications for high-speed networks. Rural and outlying hospitals and clinics rarely have access to the expertise and experience of doctors in urban centres. But diagnoses and consulting can be done with the help of high-quality audio and video and of real-time data connections between central and remote facilities.

Education. Schools at all levels are already using high-speed Internet connections in teaching and research, and many see the networks as ways to help smooth out the radically unequal distribution of resources between different regions and institutions. Colleges provide access to course materials online, via streaming videos of lectures, for instance. High schools use the Internet for research purposes and help students create their own multimedia Web sites.