[12833] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: What is required for information access?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Karl Denninger)
Mon May 30 21:41:30 1994
From: karl@mcs.com (Karl Denninger)
To: SROTH@ucsvax.ucs.umass.edu (Seth Rothberg)
Date: Mon, 30 May 1994 13:14:24 -0500 (CDT)
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: <01HCX9CLI2X29OD282@phobos.ucs.umass.edu> from "Seth Rothberg" at May 29, 94 07:57:52 pm
>
> Karl Denninger (karl@MCS.Net) writes, vis a vis universal access, that
> 80% of the population is already hooked up or can afford to be but that:
>
> >the other 20% of the problem is more difficult, but bringing the net into
> >the libraries of the nation on publically-accessible terminals -- not so
> >people can write letters -- we already have a means to do that -- but so
> >they can participate in the electronic discourse and get at the vast
> >information stored here -- can enfranchise the other 20%.
>
> >No massive government subsidy is needed. A 28.8kbps nailed-up leased
> >circuit link to a library is sufficient. If you want to really make it
> >more friendly, go for a 56kbps link. Today, that's enough. And today,
> >that's affordable.
>
> Karl, I'm curious. What are "nailed-up leased circuit links?" How much
> is the 28.8kbps version? How much is the 56kbps? How much will it cost
> to maintain them? What about increased phone bills?
3002 2-wire leased circuits. Typically, around here, the line charge for
something like that is well under $100 a month. They are usage-insensitive.
We charge $250 for IP service over that line, making total cost run under
$350 monthly. That includes full commercial routing, monitoring and
management of the router on the remote end, newsfeeds (or NNTP permission
if you want), etc.
The 56kbps version of that costs $500 + ~$170 for the line, or under $700
monthly.
The trick is usually the installation charges -- that's a couple of
thousand, in no small part due to the local telco costs and hardware.
The solution to that is a one-shot grant that pays for the initial
connection.
The 28.8kbps service is turning out to be <immensely> popular around here.
Due to modem compression and our clocking the interfaces at 57.6kbps you
get remarkedly close to 56kbps service -- higher latency, but fairly close
to the same throughput -- at a <much> lower cost. One of the reasons that
we can do it is that this kind of circuit doesn't require a CISCO AGS+
interface to manage on our side -- and thus, we don't have to amortize
$50,000 routers over the life of the connections. Instead, we can do it
using some rather interesting technical tricks at our offices and "mundane"
hardware which costs us peanuts compared to those CISCOs.
> I work at a fairly wealthy public library in a fairly wealthy university
> town. Our endowment is big and funds about one third of our yearly budget.
> Just under two-thirds comes from property taxes. The rest comes from the
> state. We could not afford to pay, say, a $1000 a month out of our current
> budget. We'd need a subsidy of some sort to get and maintain connectivity.
Can you afford less than half of that?
I suspect you can, IF connectivity is important to your system.
--
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