Meganet: How The Global Communications Network Will Connect Everyone On Earth

São Paulo, Brazil's largest city, has more mobile phones than does Paris. The largest phone system in Kampuchea is cellular. In the next twenty years, within one generation, everyone on earth will be able to place a phone call to anyone else anywhere. This Meganet is a patchwork of networks, big and small, local and global, primitive and high-tech, that fit together because they share compatible technologies.Most of Meganet is hidden in underground cables or in microwave circuits that move through the atmosphere with the speed of light. Meganet involves linemen stringing wire through South American jungles and Motorola executives investing 4 billion in Iridium stock to link millions of mobile phones.Why is Meganet emerging now? Two of our largest industries, electronics and communications, are changing quickly, often in an escalating tango of investment, technological breakthroughs, and distribution. The barriers to an advanced, digitized Meganet are economic and political. Over fifty governments are dismantling their communications monopolies by converting them wholly or partly into private enterprises. This new, competitive, and private-sector-oriented milieu has become the most important factor favoring the completion of the advanced, global Meganet early in the twenty-first century.Wilson Dizard's Meganet is a report on the progress and setbacks in expanding Meganet resources to everyone on earth. He examines not only the advantages, such as toll-free numbers and credit cards, but also such downsides as the potential invasions of privacy and the question of who will and who should control Meganet. Dizard describes the likely players: from the oil and utility companies who own desirable rights-of-way to Silicon Valley to emerging innovators in Chile and Germany.