Optics & Photonics News

Hi-OVIS mobile system set up to broadcast a school event on a playing field.

Jeff Hecht

The First Fibers to Homes

Thirty-five years ago this month, Japan’s Ministry for International Trade and Industry announced plans to build the world’s first fibered city. A two-way fiber-optic network called the Highly Interactive Optical Visual Information System (Hi-OVIS) was far ahead of its time. It foreshadowed today’s broadband fiber-to-the-home networks.

odern optical communications was born in a
visionary era. Electronic technology grew explo-
sively after World War II. Television sets went
from novelties to commonplace in the 1950s, and, by the birth
of the laser in 1960, Bell Labs had visions of transforming the
telephone network to video. Social visionaries hoped that new
communications technology would transform society.

Yet many visionaries complained that television had not lived up to its potential. In May 1961, the 35-year-old chairman of

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the Federal Communications Commission, Newton Minow, told the National Association of Broadcasters that commercial television had become a “vast wasteland.” He didn’t condemn all programs, but he said that too many of them were bad.

He was far from alone. When writer Isaac Asimov wrote about the tremendous potential bandwidth of laser communications in the August 1962 issue of ;e Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, he mused: “Imagine what the keen minds of our entertainment industry could do if they realized they had