[1823] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
A bit of facts
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (David J. Farber)
Wed Jan 1 18:33:16 1992
Date: Wed, 1 Jan 92 18:27:25 EST
From: farber@central.cis.upenn.edu (David J. Farber)
To: com-priv@psi.com
Just to bring a bit of facts to some of the discussions.
The National Research Council's study in the mid 1980's, Toward a
National Research Network, called for a three phase evolution of the
NREN. Phase one was the T1 network followed by a step up to T3 in
Phase 2. The rational for the step up was NOT just total bandwidth
but was the hope that higher instantaneous bandwidth would bring
applications to the community not easily done at T1 -- like video.
The original Merit award was supported by the State of Michigan, IBM
and MCI. That is quite usual and proper. Matching funds, cost sharing
what ever you want to call it is not at all unusual and is damn near
a requirement in order to win any such an award.
When the DS3 network started , DS 3 routers were not easy to build --
they still are hard. IBM did a fine job of doing that!! We can maybe
do better now but that's now!!
By the way, the NRC study said the next step was the gigabit network
and that is the long term objective of the Darpa/NSF Gigabit Testbed
Initiative.
Dave
(one of the authors of the NRC report)
