Technology provides new links to homes

Technology provides new links to homes
Stars and Stripes
Pacific edition, Sunday, November 11, 2007


AFN viewers started with just one TV channel and no Internet.

That’s improved significantly, but several issues remain.

Not that long ago, isolation from home seemed a routine part of life for servicemembers and civilians stationed overseas.

Finding a favorite TV show or catching a ballgame usually meant watching tape on the Armed Forces Network’s lone channel. No one had even heard of the Internet. And in the early 1990s, a call to friends or family in the U.S. cost $1 a minute from many Pacific locations.

The landscape certainly has changed.

The American Forces Network’s broad expansion and other telecommunications advances have given people media options once thought unimaginable. But the rapid-fire innovations also have fed into familiar problems, including a lack of competition and service issues at most bases, and corruption charges in one location.


Rest of article at: http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=50177



uhc comment: Servicemembers get access to roughly 15 American channels, including movies and Fox Noise --> http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=50179