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Date: Tue, 7 Jan 92 17:14:33 PST From: lars@casper.CMC.COM (Lars Poulsen) To: sean@dsl.pitt.edu Cc: com-priv@psi.com, jgong@us.oracle.com I was suggesting that the CO/RE distinction is more trouble than it is worth, and maybe the midlevels and backbone should just go commercial. If NSF still wanted to underwrite the RE part of the network, it could be done with a subsidy to qualifying RE subscriber institutions, who would be free to shop around for service providers. JG> From: "John Gong" <jgong@us.oracle.com> JG> Hear, hear. Put the money into providing more accessible services and JG> information. Then customers will decide whether they're willing to pay JG> for it (they will) and how fast/how much they want (pipe size-oriented fee JG> schedule). I was actually not suggesting anything as radical as that. My proposal extends only to the transport network. Who provides information services and how they get paid is a separate, but also interesting question. SML> From: sean@dsl.pitt.edu (sean mclinden) SML>What about *essential* services. What is available on the Internet, now, is SML>not just a business tool, it is an educational tool of tremendous value. It SML>is all the technical journals, plus Consumer Reports, plus a lot of other SML>things rolled into one. To talk of it as simply an e-mail/USENET news reader SML>is, I think to choose a very poor metaphor. SML>The computer (where, as Sun says "the network *is* the computer), is the SML>the most valuable educational tool yet produced. It allows you to educate SML>yourself at whatever pace you can sustain (or, in your world, whatever SML>pace you can afford). Would you want your children's education to be billed SML>by the minute (or by the byte) independent of what they actually used? The commercialization of the longhaul network has only a peripheral relationship to educational end-user costs. It is entirely possible that we might end up with a system where the per-packet and per-byte cost is negligible, allowing libraries to provide free walk-up terminals for their users. I am very concerned that there be affordable access for personal educational use for ordinary people. I am just not convinced that the most cost-effective way to achieve this is by a massive funnelling of subsidies from big government (NSF) to big business (IBM/MCI). If all interstate IP carriers were required to join CIX, or something similar, and each of them was free to develop its own rate structure, we would see a few years of intense competition between MCI, ATT, SPRint, UUNET, PSI, CERFnet and the other FARnet members. Whether the winner would be a wireline carrier, the FARnet regionals, or the nationwide IP specialists is not at all clear to me. On the other hand, it does seem pretty clear that if a dominant carrier is guranteed to get paid for all the government sponsored RE traffic, that carrier has a unique competitive advantage. SML>And what about "dialing in." That may be sufficient for you, but people SML>(and I mean normal citizens) are putting whole networks in their homes. SML>Although groups such as the CODA group at CMU are working on disconnected SML>mode filesystem, a great many Internet applications require connected SML>mode to maintain reliability. Perhaps, in the future, disconnected SML>operations supported on switched services will be the way to share a limited SML>bandwidth, equitably. But that isn't what's running on the campuses of SML>CMU, Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, or scores of other places. I expect ISDN B-channels to become the standard residential attachment. We should focus our efforts on making sure that those are reasonably priced (i.e. at roughly the price of today's telephone connections) for local calls. I speak from, but certainly not for, CMC (a Rockwell International Company). / Lars Poulsen, SMTS Software Engineer CMC Rockwell lars@CMC.COM
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