A Trip Along the North Carolina Information Highway
Rarely has a government initiative received as much attention as the North Carolina Information
Highway. From its inception, the highway has been either acclaimed as "our technology future" or
criticized as "just another expensive government program." Where is the truth? That’s what the General
Assembly decided to find out when it charged the Office of the State Controller (OSC) to assess the
highway’s value.
The Controller’s Office has taken this mandate seriously, spending the last year surveying users, holding
public hearings, interviewing key stakeholders and evaluating the current status as well as future promise
of the North Carolina Information Highway (NCIH). What we have done, in short, is to take a trip
across the state, listening to our customers.
This report summarizes the findings and conclusions we came to along the way. It is designed to make the complex issues surrounding the NCIH understandable to those who have a stake in North Carolina’s technology future—elected officials, community leaders, business executives, public employees, citizens and students. For those interested in more information, detailed technical reports are available from the Office of the State Controller.
Before we begin our journey, however, let’s pause for a moment to take a look at the world around us. Here is what we see:
We hope the state will lead, as it has in the past. With rapid advances in technology, changes in the telecommunications industry and continued deregulation, this role is more important than ever before. Because unless we coordinate technical platforms and standards, we will miss out on opportunities to connect people with the information they need, to reduce the costs of government, to improve public services and to prepare our children for the future.
That’s why we must reframe the entire debate about the NCIH. North Carolina’s leaders cannot—and should not—consider this effort in isolation from the rest of the state’s information technology strategies, but as one part of an integrated telecommunications network. We need to envision a new strategy that focuses on connecting people where they are with what they need, whether a student in a classroom, judge in the courtroom or doctor in a teaching hospital.
Ultimately, the state’s goal should be to provide the right technology at the right time and right place at the right cost. To do that, we will have to leave the past behind us and engage in candid conversation about where we’ve been, where we’re going and how to get there. And that’s what this report is all about.
The student who takes a "field trip" to the Smithsonian Institution from her classroom in Durham. . .All are signs of a cultural revolution, of a scale we haven’t seen since Gutenburg developed the printing press. Just as then, the world is now experiencing a dramatic shift in the availability of information. It’s called interactive media and it puts voice, data and video together to produce opportunities few of us can imagine.The housewife who communicates with relatives via e-mail. . .
The company that fills an order from Japan in 10 minutes, without putting anything in a carton. . .
This revolution is not only changing technology, but every aspect of the way we do business—and we are just starting up that steep curve. The signs are already evident in the workplace and in our homes. For example:
Traditionally, North Carolina has chosen to lead. We were leaders in the creation of the Research Triangle Park, which has become an international model of public and private cooperation fostering economic growth. We positioned ourselves to lead in the telecommunications revolution, becoming the first state to offer a statewide digital network. And now, once again, we find ourselves blazing the trail with the information highway.
The Technology Horizon
ATM. . .SONET. . . LATA. . .LAN. . . WAN. . . IXC. . . The alphabet soup used to describe the
information highway leaves all but the most technical audiences behind. To help translate, a glossary of
terms is included in the appendix of this report. But without some understanding of the technological
context within which the state is operating, it will be difficult or impossible to evaluate how well we are
doing. For those who need a refresher course, then, we offer this technology primer.
Let’s begin with the big picture. Technology is not a North Carolina issue, nor even a national issue: the
whole world is changing and these changes are no longer being measured in years or decades, but in
months. Even as we go to press with this document, important decisions are being made regarding
deregulation of the telecommunications industry, which will have a powerful impact on availability and
costs. In other words, we are talking about a changing, uncertain environment where advances are
coming so rapidly, the state must project far ahead to avoid implementing systems that are quickly out of
date.
Consider the changes in data transmission capacity: in 1950, technology allowed us to transmit 40 bits per second (bit, the basic unit of data communication, describes how much information is transmitted in a period of time). By 1980, we could transmit 9,600 bits per second; by 1990, 56,000 bits per second; and by 1992, 45 million bits per second. Today, we can transmit more than 1 billion bits per second over the information highway. To understand what this means, consider the decrease in the time it would take to transmit the 30 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica, as shown below.
The result? Huge amounts of information have found their way into all corners of the private and public sectors. However, computers, the basic tools that harness the power of information, are supplied by a wide variety of vendors, each with its own proprietary equipment and applications. In this environment, information is dispersed and often inaccessible, making it difficult for organizations to achieve their objectives.
Today’s challenge is to manage information resources and ensure that all parts of the organization have access to the information they need to make wise decisions. That means managing and integrating personal computers—as well as e-mail, word processing, voice systems, Local Area Networks (such as all the computers in a school) and Wide Area Networks (all the computers in a school district or county)—into a smoothly running system. At the same time, security must be preserved.
To judge what any network has to offer, then, decision makers need to consider four basic criteria:
To help organizations navigate this maze, the International Standards Organization (ISO), an independent organization that generates and coordinates worldwide standards, has recommended standards for Open Systems Interconnection (OSI). These recommendations provide a seven-layer model designed to allow easy sharing and exchange of information.
To achieve its purpose, however, data must be routed to the end user. That’s where ATM comes in. ATM, a computerized high speed switch, allows us to use the capacity of fiber optics. It offers the flexibility to transmit voice, data, image and video at 155 million bits per second—84 times the speed of the state’s existing T-1 (copper wire) network—and will continue to increase as switches are improved.
The final component is SONET, the protocols or standards for how to move information across the network, which puts the pieces together to make them work. SONET provides a combination of broadband and narrowband traffic, allowing different systems to seamlessly interconnect.
For those less familiar with the technology, it might be helpful to compare NCIH to a water system. The state has chosen huge "pipes"—fiber optics—to carry volumes of information to major hubs and smaller feeder pipes to get appropriate amount of resources to the individual. ATM is the "faucet" that delivers the information where it is needed, and SONET is the manual that explains how to do it.
Carrying this analogy a step further, the NCIH was built with the capacity to handle far more information than is required today, based on the assumption that demand will continue to grow and that the infrastructure should be built just once. As with plumbing, it is more costly initially to install the larger pipes. However, as usage increases, the incremental costs will go down, and it will be much easier to upgrade the faucets—the electronics—than the pipes.
This technology is not offered instead of existing technologies, but in addition to them. Because ultimately, there is no one best technology that fits all sizes: it all depends on what the user wants to do. The NCIH offers the capacity to do many different things, including high-speed transmission of large applications, such as video or large volumes of data. It provides communication within Local Access Transport Areas—LATAs—as well as between them. (LATAs define the boundaries within which local telephone companies can provide end user services.)
This capacity is not required for all users: if an institution simply wants to connect to the Internet or communicate with a nearby office, other more appropriate alternatives are provided by the Office of the State Controller, as described in the following section.
A Brief History of the Information Highway
North Carolina has long been a leader in telecommunications. In 1984, our state converted voice and
data transmission from analog to digital, becoming one of the first to consolidate a digital network. And
as soon as the network was implemented, we began to plan for what would be needed next.
Long before the term "information highway" became part of the nation’s vernacular, our leaders were
looking at alternatives to keep up with increasing demand. In the meantime, the need for integrated
technology was promoted in different quarters—quarters that transcended the traditional boundaries of
political parties or branches of government:
On the policy level, planning began with Governor Hunt’s Policy Committee for the Information Highway, composed of high level representatives from the state’s public education, higher education, criminal justice, health care and local communities. On the operational level, responsibility was delegated to OSC, which sought assistance from MCNC, University of North Carolina System’s Educational Computing Service, users’ groups and research staff of the telephone companies.
After evaluating current options and emerging technologies, the State Government Network Planning Committee established by the Office of the State Controller concluded that ATM/SONET technology was the best solution. The committee then identified 3,400 potential sites—including schools, hospitals, libraries, community colleges and government agencies across the state—where such technology would be warranted. At the same time, the three major telephone companies—Southern Bell, Sprint/Carolina Telephone and GTE—were invited to do a feasibility study for a shared network, with the state as the anchor tenant.
From the beginning, this effort was based on a public-private partnership, with the state responsible for building internal capacity—that is, establishing standards, recommending equipment and transport mechanisms, and providing customer premise equipment, such as cameras and televisions—and the telephone companies responsible for installing the fiber optic cables, managing the switches, and maintaining and updating the infrastructure. In fact, even while plans for the highway were being laid, the telephone companies participated in extensive trials with Vision Carolina, a project that used fiber optics to link 16 educational sites—high schools, community colleges, universities and a medical center—across the state. Its success showed just what could be accomplished with the new technology.
Since 1993, the three telephone companies have spent millions of dollars and thousands of staff hours on the project. Even with this private sector contribution, however, it was clear that the state would also have to make a significant investment in the NCIH.
After some initial confusion over the purposes of funding—capital outlay versus operating costs—the General Assembly appropriated $7 million for the highway in 1994. The funding made grants of up to $100,000 available to public entities interested in establishing or operating a site for three years. In 1995, appropriations amounted to an additional $2.5 million—substantially less than the amount requested—to subsidize the cost of 74 sites approved by the legislature.
The first 33 NCIH sites were up and running in August, 1994. By March 1996, 125 sites were operating, with an additional 15 sites pending installation. Of the 125 operational sites, 80 are video only, four are data only and 41 are using both video and data services. What are they being used for? To name just a few examples:
| Highlighted - Counties with Operational Sites |
While the NCIH has proven what it can do, that doesn’t mean that the highway is the only answer to current and future technology needs. In fact, the state operates a web of interoperable narrowband and broadband networks known as the North Carolina Integrated Information Network (NCIIN), of which the highway is just one part.
The NCIIN is a new structure established by the Controller’s Office for managing the network. It provides a “toolkit” of connection services that provide appropriate communications to government agencies at whatever level they want—from access to the Internet to high speed, full-motion video. Current offerings include:
In addition, as required by the General Assembly, the Office of State Controller initiated a study of the 74 approved sites to evaluate the benefits and effectiveness of the NCIH. Here is what we found.
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| Home Page | Foreword | Contents | Are Now | Going | Appendices |