A substantial improvement to HITS can be obtained by using digital networking technology with reserved bandwidth instead of the existing analog infrastructure. Compression and encoding can provide greater capacity using existing hardware, and using digital networking allows additional capacity to be purchased on a more cost-effective ``as needed'' basis.
Ultimately, the need and potential is for a network as capillary as that of the telephone system, but with higher raw capacity and the same or lower cost, as well as inexpensive additional services such as voice- and video-conferencing for one-to-one, one-to-many, and parliamentary communication. The terminal can be each individual's desktop workstation, augmented with cameras and necessary software, at a cost no more than double the cost of the workstation itself. The necessary connectivity, bandwidth, and bandwidth and latency guarantees can be provided by technologies ranging from conventional telephone trunk lines to ATM and Gigabit Ethernet. While a bandwidth of 400Kb/s is sufficient for low-quality video, bandwidth reservation is required for reasonable interaction, as is a guaranteed latency of no more than a few hundred ms. By capillary we mean that every faculty's office, every conference room, and most students' offices (especially in the case of non-traditional students working full-time in the high-technology field) can be equipped at reasonable cost for video-conferencing, video production, store-and-replay, and the required network connectivity. While the cost of long-distance connectivity is currently substantial, once the long distance is paid for, the capillary redistribution need not be expensive.
With capillary on-demand video-conferencing, we can provide not only lectures (with convenient and informal before-and-after lecture interaction), but also extended remote office hours, perhaps instructor-initiated for students who exhibit deficiencies. Students who exhibit similar deficiencies can be brought together into a small ad-hoc asynchronous "study group", with and without instructor interaction, something which is considerably more cumbersome in the current environment where the normal mode of interaction requires people to be in the same place at the same time, and the only realistic asynchronous alternative is e-mail.
Capillary on-demand video-conferencing with store-and-replay also provides opportunities for student interaction with other students. Instructors could periodically review (on-line or off-line) these interactions to see whether the students have an adequate understanding of the material, in much the same way that an instructor can walk into a computer lab to help students and to see what kinds of problems the students are having.