ng high capacity networks and switching. The APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Conference) nations are also sponsoring projects using telecommunications networks for distance education and training, health care delivery, and economic development. Yet there are still areas in the industrialized G-7 countries with very limited access to telecommunications. APEC members include not only the industrialized economies of Japan, Singapore, the United States, and Canada, but also countries with much greater gaps in their infrastructure, such as China, Thailand, and the Philippines. Gill: Promise or hype? Against this background, why all the hyperbole about electronic superhighways? Several themes recur in these information infrastructure initiatives. There are dual assumptions that converging technologies will result in information services with both social and economic benefits, and that both public and private sectors must be engaged to ensure the installation of national broadband networks. Yet these assumptions need to be carefully examined. Each new communication technology has been heralded as offering numerous benefits. Satellites and cable television were to provide the courses taught by the best instructors to students in schools, homes and workplaces. Videoconferencing was to largely eliminate business travel. Telemedicine was to replace referral of patients to specialists. Computers were to replace traditional teaching with more personalized and interactive instruction. To some extent all of the prophesies have been fulfilled, yet the potential of the technologies is far from fully realized. In many cases, it took institutional change and incentives to innovate in order for these technologies to have much effect. In North America, the more remarkable change is in these incentives rather than the technologies. As school districts face shrinking budgets and new curricular requirements, as spiraling health care budgets are targeted by governm...
