[1321] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
What is the Definition of Infrastructure?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (tmn!cook@uunet.uu.net)
Mon Sep 9 23:00:36 1991
From: tmn!cook@uunet.uu.net
To: com-priv@psi.com
Date: Mon Sep 9 22:58:14 1991
<<MESSAGE from>> Gordon Cook 09-SEP-91 22:58
cook@tmn
I have acquired and been reading a postscript version, including the
figures of the ANS Plan for Commercial Services.
It talks of gateway attachment fees and leaves me with the impression that
a mid-level network could attach to the T-3 backbone at a T-1 speed and
pay a heck of a lot less than for a T-3 speed attachment. Is this
correct? The base fee is $55,000 for T-1 and there are also a number of
surcharges depending on the amount of commercial traffic the mid-level
sends across the backbone? One such surcharge and one that is mostly (?)
independent of the question of the amount of commercial traffic is the
contribution to the national infrastructure pool? (The amount given for
this was about $4,000.)
Please would Ittai, or someone else from ANS or someone from the NSF who
knows tell us what the definition of infrastructure is? I have the
impression that infrastructure is limited to the installation of faster
network trunks and faster or better network switches. Is this correct?
But is the definition of infrastructure really limited to hardware and
bitpipes? Could the building of infrastructure mean taking money from the
pool to pay the attachment costs of some less wealthy colleges? Could it
mean using some money from the pool to fund the development of multimedia
email or some of the fancy data bases talked about in the NREN vision?
The ANS document talks about a Resource Allocation Committee for
allocating the funds in the pool to "projects." Would someone be willing
to define what the scope of possible projects might be? I think the
definition of what is meant by infrastructure is important to the
understanding of what is happening.
