By 1996, the Information Carriers had agreed on protocols and standards that would allow information to flow freely from one system to the next.
-
Private and public networks were able to be integrated easily and thus provided seamless communication with enough bandwidth to allow multimedia data types.
-
Early attention was paid to signing up high-volume commercial users, likely to spring for the still relatively expensive hardware, and to help train their employees. The Information Carriers used the volume of this commercial demand to pay for an increased pace of fiber installation.
-
By 1999, commercial use had driven down the cost of the necessary hardware, even as it had simplified use and "educated" a large number of workers; households begin to link to the Net in significant number.
|
