Abstract
Since the early 1990s the arrival of an Information Superhighway has gripped the imaginations of the citizens, politicians and industrialists of Europe. But the concept of a ‘wired society’ is not new: similar prophecies were voiced in the 1970s and early 1980s before the failures of the French Minitel and British Prestel experiments due to the lack of consumer demand for the pre-digital analogue coaxial versions of the superhighway (Dutton 1995). Compression and digitisation promise to open the way for the merging of telephony, televison and computers with the bandwidth capacity to support full real-time multi-media applications (voice, text and video) on an Integrated Broadband Network (IBN). The digitisation of voice, image and data has undermined the discrete regulatory regimes that have governed the European telecommunications and television industries. We are witnessing a global rush to position nations, regions and industrial interests at the forefront of the next great consumer revolution.
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Levy, C. (1997). The European Road to the Information Superhighway. In: Symes, V., Levy, C., Littlewood, J. (eds) The Future of Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25379-1_9
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