[12790] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Ethernet to the Home
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (TELEWORKER@aol.com)
Sun May 29 01:19:46 1994
From: TELEWORKER@aol.com
To: com-priv@psi.com
Date: Sat, 28 May 94 10:16:53 EDT
It's a great question, and how it's answered reflects the that individual's
degree of entrenchment in existing infrastructure.
I've seen someone who does numbers for PacBell argue that the uptake for
this kind of service is 3 percent -- no more -- with little elasticity in
demand (w/ regard to pricing) in the foreseeable future. So that number
justifies why they don't tariff data services. Sometimes we think the BOCs
see a world where their primary business is in security systems -- walling
off the wired from the great unwired masses.
We interpolate that vision and see that 65 percent of households have
someone in them that works with a computer. Color in people in post-secondary
programs of all stripes with access to computing centers and you hit at least
70 percent of households as raw potential. We see this kind of service as a
basis for promoting telecommuting everywhere. Will everyone buy? Of course
not. But if you package it -- if you make it a product, and if you scale it
both into businesses and communities -- a vision of servers in every fire
house and town hall in America, for example -- you can get local ties that
bind people in at real net speed. Suddenly you have MPEG files of every
garage band and township string quartet in America stored locally, available
globally. I could imagine worse.
The telecommuting vision here is key. Many metro area are at carrying
capacity for cars. We can't add much more transport dependence to commerce.
We can, however, add substantial value by coordination and collaboration.
Differentiation and expression are the "production components" of knowledge
work. They don't require you to travel from one place to another in order to
accomplish them. They do, however, require richer, more real time connection
to background resources (reference, documents, etc.) We can't help but think
that in order to make an Ethernet/IP architecture pay, those laying it in
will have to evangelize telecommuting.
With global ATM looming, it will certainly be possible to lay in
metropolitan area nets with mixed-mode transports carrying IP everywhere, and
do so economically. Ethernet everywhere happens to be the most affordable
(cheap really).means at present. Our concern is with how it scales to a real
multimedia speed (100Mbps).
= Rich Thoma and Joe Raimondo =
Telecommuting Solutions for America
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Evaluation, advisory, and advocacy for technology adoption regarding
telework, teleaccess, and telelearning.
2200 Benson Street
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+1-215-342-0644
Teleworker@aol.com, teleworker@mcimail.com
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