[1200] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Interesting new player
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Joe Abernathy)
Wed Aug 21 18:18:58 1991
Date: Wed, 21 Aug 91 16:23:29 CDT
From: edtjda@magic322.chron.com (Joe Abernathy)
To: uunet!central.cis.upenn.edu!farber@uunet.UU.NET
Cc: com-priv@psi.com, steve@nsf.gov
Metropolitan Fiber Systems, an RBOC competitor, on Tuesday introduced
an array of high-performance networking services. Guy Almes of ANS was
on hand in New York for the press conference, so perhaps he would be
a better person than me to analyze the importance, but briefly:
MFS has constructed a 100 mbps FDDI ring to serve as a metropolitan
area network connecting the employment centers of Houston. This
service apparently will be made available elsewhere in mfs-served
cities as business warrants.
One of their interests is in providing clear channel connections
to the network T3 cloud, assuming anyone's interested in purchasing
such a service. Their thinking is still too preliminary to say
whether they might compete for future NSF contracts, if there are
any of those.
Metropolitan's new services are protocol-transparent. Using technology
designed primarily by Stan Hanks, they pick up the information,
encapsulate it, transmit it and offload it in a process they swear
is the hottest thing for network security since sliced bandwidth. :)
Southwestern Bell says it plans to compete as well when its SMDS
is ready, but no word on when that might be. Apparently, it will be
tested on a project that apparently had quite a lot to do with providing
inspiration for Stan Hanks' project. Baylor College of Medicine, in the
Texas Medical Center, is reported to share a desire with Rice University
to establish a high-speed connection between the two. Medical imaging
would seem to provide adequate motivation for this, but I defer
to Stan Barber on this. Rice, if you don't know, manages the Sesquinet
Project, one of two Texas regionals.
rfc.
Joe
