In Experimental Project Victoria, Phone Lines Add Multiple Channels for Services
Twelve-year-old Victoria Edrington may not yet grasp the significance of what is being done in her name, but the technology underlying Project Victoria may well be commonplace before she leaves her teens.
Project Victoria is the code name for a “black box” whose electronic innards split--or multiplex--an ordinary telephone line into multiple channels, enabling it to carry out up to seven jobs simultaneously.
Victoria’s father, Thomas Edrington, a Pacific Bell engineer, helped design the system, which has just completed four months of technical testing by 200 households in this rapidly urbanizing community east of Oakland.
Only a few of the seven channels were used for the test. But these were enough to do what can’t now be done commercially--obtain electronic information services or transmit computer data without tying up the phone.
Potential other uses, according to Pacific Bell, include hooking up an emergency alarm service, monitoring energy use, selecting pay-television programs, reading utility meters, accessing videotext services and banking and shopping from home--all with the present copper wire linking the phone company’s switch and customer.
“The technology itself worked wonderfully for me,” said Judy E. Hayes, a county librarian who participated in the field test. “I had no problems with it at all. You appreciate not having your phone line tied up” while obtaining other electronic services.
According to Michael L. Eastwood, who directs new network applications for Pacific Bell in the sprawling new service center in neighboring San Ramon, the field test showed that the technology was not only as reliable as the network itself but possessed a greater-than-anticipated capacity.
“It needed some tweaking and tuning,” Eastwood acknowledged during an interview last week, “but it worked exceedingly well, and it exceeded the technological boundaries.”
First Major R&D; Project
The system, Pacific Bell’s first major research and development project, was built to work over distances of up to 18,000 feet--about 3 1/2 miles--from a customer’s home to the company’s nearest switch (the so-called local loop).
In reality, it worked at distances exceeding four miles, Eastwood said. That would put it within reach of between 80% and 90% of the potential market for the device and the information services that it makes accessible, he estimated.
“Victoria is a superhighway,” said Tom A. Bergmann, a project manager. Were it available in 1984, it would have vastly eased Pacific Bell’s task of providing local telecommunications for the Los Angeles Olympic Games and for the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, he said. Instead of stringing miles of additional wires at the Coliseum, for example, Project Victoria multiplexers could have been added to each existing line to increase its capacity.
The stake for local communications carriers such as Pacific Bell is substantial, Eastwood said. Already one-tenth of all revenue generated by the local network, designed to carry voice transmissions, comes from moving such data as payroll and other financial information.
Nationally, consumers will spend $123 billion this year on network services--voice and data--and the figure is expected to swell to $209 billion in four years.
Project Victoria offers a shortcut to what has been called the “rewiring of America” that is expected to take place over the next decade. Telecommunications experts are seeking to set international standards for what is called an integrated services digital network (or ISDN) that will serve the emerging global village in which the longest distance equals the nearest phone or computer terminal.
Victoria’s transmission standards, established before relevant ISDN standards were approved, can easily be converted to conform, Eastwood said. “We’re really breaking new ground with Victoria.”
Similar technologies in the development stage elsewhere--Chicago-based Ameritech is about to begin field testing ISDN technology--are “more complementary than competitive” in Pacific Bell’s view, Eastwood said, since the company’s goal is to enhance and increase the use of its existing public network and the revenue it generates.
Although patents have been applied to cover the “smart elements” contained in the black box, he said, ownership is not essential to Pacific Bell.
(The company is forbidden from manufacturing the units commercially--the tested boxes are hand-made prototypes--but it intends to license the technology and collect royalties as well as the additional revenue from increased use of its network.)
The field test, which began in April, involved 200 volunteers, half of them PacBell employees and all of them residents of the surrounding community. Each participating household was provided, at no charge, with an Apple personal computer and access to half a dozen information services. The goal was technical and not commercial and did not seek to measure value to the participants.
Community Bulletin Board
Technologically, however, “more than 90%” said the project met or exceeded their expectations, Eastwood said.
Hayes, the librarian, liked the community bulletin board, which water district employee Stephen Abbors also found useful, since his duties require monitoring the Danville City Council’s agenda, which was listed on the Danville service. “It has really expanded my work horizons,” Abbors said.
To an experienced computer user such as Doug Masiel of HBO & Co., a health-care information firm, the high-speed transmission of data was particularly valuable. This greatly reduced the transmission time for graphics, Masiel said, and the quality was uniformly high. Another computer user, Ken Minett of Chevron, appreciated having the family phone kept free even while he was shipping data or memos to the office from home.
Pacific Bell’s next step will be to test Project Victoria’s commercial appeal. Test sites, possibly in Mountain View in Silicon Valley or in the Los Angeles area, are expected to be announced later this month, Eastwood said.
Marketing Test to Come
Already the technological test offered some intriguing clues, said Dorinda Nyberg, who is responsible for carrying out the tests. For example, she said, interest in information services grew equally among participants new to computers and those having a high degree of computer literacy. “That was an ‘ah- ha !’ for us,” she said.
The marketing test--which is expected to begin early next year and could presage a commercial launching a year later--will gauge the public’s willingness to pay for what it obtained for free in the technical test, Eastwood said.
The phone company, he said, finds itself between two sets of customers: phone users and information vendors. The better and more valuable the services offered by vendors, the greater the attraction for phone customers to sign up for black box service.
“Remember,” Eastwood said, “telephones were just for the rich initially. Now they are universally available, and the biggest users are at the low end of the market. That’s where the numbers are.”
