Wiring a High-Tech Small Town

Developers of the ambitious Playa Vista project are wagering that they will attract residents and businesses to the proposed mini-city near Marina del Rey by offering a trip back to the future--to a place where small town charms and high-tech communications will converge.

The mega-development, whose star tenant is the start-up DreamWorks SKG studio, is designed in what planners call “neo-traditional” fashion--with front porches, central squares, walking paths and homes close to businesses--to provoke a greater communion between people and between people and their environment.

Yet, underlying the proposed $7-billion community of apartments, condominiums, stores and offices will also be a web of wiring that the developers say will allow the fastest and most advanced forms of communication via telephone, television and computer.

Developer Maguire Thomas Partners and allies from GTE to DreamWorks mogul Steven Spielberg are touting the communications system with a panoply of images--a mother video-conferencing with her child or a teacher to settle a problem at school, without leaving her desk at work; a motion picture editor cutting film on a home computer, with the results available back at the studio instantaneously; a businesswoman opening her home’s front door for a contractor via remote control and then checking in periodically on video to make sure a kitchen remodeling is proceeding correctly.

Not everyone is oohing and aahing, though, over what they say is just the most recent in a long line of utopian proposals that have promised consumers a magical menu of communications options.

Too often, say the critics, the technology has overwhelmed torpid public demand.

“When I start to hear these things about picture phones and video phones, then I start to worry,” says Michael Noll, a professor at USC’s Annenberg School of Communications. “These things have been futzed with for decades and decades. People just don’t want them. In fact, they would probably pay extra not to get these kinds of services.”

The developers of Playa Vista say they are aware that other builders have promised communications stars and delivered, instead, clunky movie libraries and marginal home shopping opportunities. While suggesting some benefits of a communications technology in their project, they generally decline to make specific promises.

Instead, Maguire Thomas Partners and GTE say they will install state-of-the-art wiring throughout the 1,087-acre development and wait for the specific uses to be dictated by future tenants.

Traditional housing tracts were linked by copper phone lines, with most communities subsequently wired for television with wider coaxial cable. Playa Vista will lay both types of lines, along with fiber-optic cable, the wiring that allows the highest-speed electronic transmissions across the broadest spectrum.

That means virtually instantaneous transmission of data, sounds and images--a boon to those who can’t wait for their modem to connect them to the Internet or who dream of the day when they can look at mom on the other end of the phone line.

GTE officials say the cost of installing the additional lines will be nominal because the work will be completed before construction of the first offices and condominiums, with all the lines to be laid simultaneously.

Douglas J. Gardner, the Maguire Thomas vice president directing Playa Vista, said: “We want to make sure that we don’t preclude things that may come along in the future . . . this whole unknown world, just because we don’t have the infrastructure.”

DreamWorks studio officials say the high-speed communication lines at Playa Vista will one day allow Spielberg and other executives to sit in an office and check in on several projects via video conference. “That’s lots of golf cart trips and phone calls to and from the sound stage that will be eliminated,” said Mike Montgomery, a senior executive at DreamWorks overseeing the studio start-up.

Noll of USC and others concede the potential business benefits of the Playa Vista communications system. They have more doubts about how and when the projected 29,000 residents will respond to ready access to new technology.

“The problem has been that it has been too costly to put a fiber line to every household for the kind of demand there has been. It just wasn’t a good business proposition,” said Walter Baer, who directs research on information infrastructures at Rand Corp. “Over the next 20 years, however, I believe there will be a demand for these services, like video telephones, for instance, as the price continues to come down.”

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GTE officials say they will bring to Playa Vista lessons from a 7-year-old experiment in Cerritos, where premium wiring helped pave the way for a special home shopping network, the delivery of a large library of movies within 30 minutes and other services.

Many Cerritos residents balked at the extra cost of the services, saying they preferred to travel to the local Blockbuster for their movies and shop and pay bills the old-fashioned way, in person.

The receptivity to high tech has been much better across the country in the Appalachian town of Blacksburg, Va., where about 40% of the 36,000 residents communicate electronically on a regular basis and where more than 7,000 people have high-speed computer connections via fiber lines installed at Virginia Tech, a local office park and several apartment houses.

The success of the so-called Blacksburg Electronic Village has been that personal communications have driven participation, rather than a menu of concocted products like video on demand, said Andrew Cohill, a Virginia Tech professor who is director of the electronic village.

Blacksburg residents send electronic messages in large numbers, check for coupons and special events at local restaurants, log on for trivia answers at a local sports-techno bar and hunt for apartments on an electronic rental listing board.

Most of those services are free or available for a nominal charge. Skeptics like USC’s Noll say it remains doubtful whether the public is interested in fee services--the kind that may be needed to inspire phone and cable companies to continue wiring homes and businesses for advanced technology.

Maguire Thomas Vice President Tom Ricci concedes that all the applications for the web of wires at Playa Vista are not clear. But Ricci concludes: “We want to make sure that this platform never becomes a limiting factor and that the only limit on how it is used is the market and the imagination of the people who live and work there.”