However, concerted industry efforts at the federal, state, and local levels resulted in the continued lessening. This venture led to the creation of a national satellite distribution system that used a newly approved domestic satellite transmission. Satellites changed the business dramatically, paving the way for the explosive growth of program networks. The second service to use the satellite was a local television station in Atlanta that broadcast primarily sports and classic movies.
The station, owned by R. By the end of the decade, growth had resumed, and nearly 16 million households were cable subscribers. The Cable Act established a more favorable regulatory framework for the industry, stimulating investment in cable plant and programming on an unprecedented level.
Deregulation provided by the Act had a strong positive effect on the rapid growth of cable services. This was the largest private construction project since World War II. By the end of the decade, nearly 53 million households subscribed to cable, and cable program networks had increased from 28 in to 79 by Some of this growth, however, was accompanied by rising prices for consumers, incurring growing concern among policy makers.
By the end of , there were cable programming services available nationwide, in addition to many regional programming networks. By the spring of , the number of national cable video networks had grown to By that time, the average subscriber could choose from a wide selection of quality programming, with more than 57 percent of all subscribers receiving at least 54 channels, up from 47 in And at the end of the decade, approximately 7 in 10 television households, more than 65 million, had opted to subscribe to cable.
The upgrade to broadband networks enabled cable companies to introduce high-speed Internet access to customers in the mids, and competitive local telephone and digital cable services later in the decade. In , the Clinton Administration turned control over the internet backbone to the private sector. It has been privately operated and funded ever since.
No one runs the internet. Thousands of companies, universities, governments, and other entities operate their own networks and exchange traffic with each other based on voluntary interconnection agreements. The shared technical standards that make the internet work are managed by an organization called the Internet Engineering Task Force. The IETF is an open organization; anyone is free to attend meetings, propose new standards, and recommend changes to existing standards.
Internet Protocol addresses are numbers that computers use to identify each other on the internet. For example, an IP address for vox. The current internet standard, known as IPv4, only allows for about 4 billion IP addresses.
This was considered a very big number in the s, but today, the supply of IPv4 addresses is nearly exhausted. So internet engineers have developed a new standard called IPv6.
IPv6 allows for a mind-boggling number of unique addresses — the exact figure is 39 digits long — ensuring that the world will never again run out. At first, the transition to IPv6 was slow. Technical work on the standard was completed in the s, but the internet community faced a serious chicken-and-egg problem: as long as most people were using IPv4, there was little incentive for anyone to switch to IPv6.
But as IPv4 addresses became scarce, IPv6 adoption accelerated. The fraction of users who connected to Google via IPv6 grew from 1 percent at the beginning of to 6 percent in mid In its early years, internet access was carried over physical cables. But more recently, wireless internet access has become increasingly common.
There are two basic types of wireless internet access: wifi and cellular. Wifi networks are relatively simple. Anyone can purchase wifi networking equipment in order to provide internet access in a home or business. Wifi networks use unlicensed spectrum: electromagnetic frequencies that are available for anyone to use without charge. Cellular networks are more centralized. They work by breaking up the service territory into cells.
In the densest areas, cells can be as small as a single city block; in rural areas a cell can be miles across. Each cell has a tower at its center providing services to devices there. When a device moves from one cell to another, the network automatically hands off the device from one tower to another, allowing the user to continue communicating without interruption.
Cells are too large to use the unlicensed, low-power spectrum used by wifi networks. Instead, cellular networks use spectrum licensed for their exclusive use.
Because this spectrum is scarce, it is usually awarded by auction. Wireless auctions have generated tens of billions of dollars in revenue for the US treasury since the first one was held in The cloud describes an approach to computing that has become popular in the early s.
By storing files on servers and delivering software over the internet, cloud computing provides users with a simpler, more reliable computing experience. Cloud computing allows consumers and businesses to treat computing as a utility, leaving the technical details to technology companies. For example, in the s, many people used Microsoft Office to edit documents and spreadsheets. They stored documents on their hard drives. And when a new version of Microsoft Office was released, customers had to purchase it and manually install it on their PCs.
In contrast, Google Docs is a cloud office suite. When a user visits docs. Microsoft now has its own cloud office suite called Office The earliest days of the consumer internet were soundtracked by a cacophony of digital hisses and beeps. As internet protocols and technologies were standardized, in the late s and early s, universities, businesses, and even regular people started to connect over the internet.
But before the invention of the World Wide Web, accomplishing anything was a real chore. Information on the internet was difficult to search for, and almost impossibly dense.
Vaughan-Nichols said on the 20th anniversary of the site in We may not have moved beyond the internet of the early s were it not for Tim Berners-Lee, who was looking for an easier way to find and share research.
Berners-Lee, who in was a researcher working at CERN, the Swiss nuclear research facility, came up with the concept of the World Wide Web , a decentralized repository of information, linked together and shareable with anyone who could connect to it. He built the first webpage in Seeing the value in what Berners-Lee and his team had created, CERN opened up the software for the web to the public domain, meaning anyone could use it and build upon it. Berners-Lee also created the first website browser initially called WorldWideWeb and then renamed Nexus.
Andreessen and his team left the research facility at UIUC to start Netscape, the company that produced the first web browser many people ever used: Netscape Navigator. But Microsoft, a huge company even then, was able to iterate its software faster as the web changed, implementing new technologies like CSS cascading style sheets—the code that ensures the web is more than just bland pages of text before Netscape could. At the time, internet services, especially in the US, started to become more affordable.
Today we can download a 1 GB file in about 32 seconds, compared with around 3. Subscribers would almost always rely on their existing phone line for connection to the internet, meaning that no one could use the phone when someone was on internet. And everyone connecting in the mids through to the mids likely knew of the horror that was the dial-up modem connection sound.
They maintain the infrastructure that keeps the internet running and deliver the entertainment experiences that Americans enjoy. A Force for American Innovation. Cable's Story. Innovation Over the Years. Late s - Early s Infrastructure Gets Boost. Leaders of Connectivity. Powering America's Digital Future. Rural Broadband.
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