[1926] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: The NREN and Regulation
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Joe Abernathy)
Wed Jan 8 18:20:40 1992
Date: Wed, 8 Jan 92 16:54:01 CST
From: edtjda@magic322.chron.com (Joe Abernathy)
To: com-priv@psi.com
>Niche companies will provide
>services to those unique areas or regional interests, and rural America
>will in general be left to what is left over because the cost of service
>will be higher than the traffice will bear. Ultimately, this latter
>areas is where the government may well have to step in to provide
>equity, either thru regulation or separate funding and support.
History provides a number of not-so-pretty examples of how unregulated
utilities failed abysmally to service rural areas. If memory serves,
the Rural Electrification Act was required to get electricity to farms,
and the regulation of the phone companies was required to get telephone
service.
One of these ugly examples is being played out as we speak. When the
FCC held the lottery for cellular service territories awhile back,
they were all snapped up handily with a proviso that service would be
rendered by such-and-such a time. Everything worked out in the cities,
but in rural areas, the only place that has service is the major
interstate highway running through an area; this way, the cellular
companies can reap the roamer revenue of through traffic without
having to build expensive cell sites all over the outback.
On a more immediate level, I recently had occasion to peruse com-priv
while traveling in northeast Oklahoma, which is populated but primarily
rural. The question, of course, was how to get into the net. The obvious
answer would have been to go through PSI's distributed network, but
they turned out to be roughly twice as expensive as sesquinet, which
admittedly is a dedicated connection with no provision for field dial-ins.
So we use sprintnet or tymnet to dial into Houston directly and from
there into sesquinet. And still it was necessary to dial long distance
from Miami, Okla., to Tulsa, which was the nearest point of presence for
sprintnet, and from there into their outdial modem pool to get into
our Unix. And back again on callback for security measures.
All in all, a bumpy ride.
Joe Abernathy edtjda@chron.com
Special Projects P.O. Box 4260
The Houston Chronicle Houston, Texas 77210
(800) 735-3820 (713) 526-9711
