Consumer communications and mass market information networking at the edge of the new millennium

Abstract

Summary form only given. The rapid growth of the Internet and the World Wide Web, and proliferation of personal computers increased our productivity, brought to life new business models, created armies of virtual millionaires and real losers, and reduced the World to a size of the global village. Today a person in Central Africa is capable of accessing the same information, use the same e-commerce vendors, and trade on-line as a person in the United States. This enormous progress still leaves most people on Earth including most of the populations of developed countries deprived of access to information that could greatly improve their lives. It is the well known today "Digital Divide" phenomenon. To include most of the mankind into the new economy we must address the specificity of consumer, mass market information networking. We present examples of mass market information access services as well as home networking applications and home information infrastructure management schemes. We offer a view on the consumer communications value chain composition that insures user-friendly mechanism for provisioning, service creation, and support of the home networking environments as well as their integration into the information infrastructure.