[2100] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Costs?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dave Hughes)
Sun Jan 26 21:24:34 1992
Date: Sun, 26 Jan 1992 19:23:50 -0700
From: Dave Hughes <daveh@csn.org>
To: com-priv@psi.com
As Brian says
>FIDO and uucp are fine but they add another layer of complexity that
>is unnecessary. It is possible to do dial-up IP just as easy as it is
>to do uucp or FIDO these days. By switching to dial-up SLIP or PPP
>for your connectivity you can take advantage of the homogeneous set of
>network applications, i.e. SMTP, NNTP, TELNET, FTP, etc. This makes
>things much simpler for the users and the network builders alike.
You forgot one minor detail - which to the big network builders is just
an annoyance passed on to somebody else - but which is to 16,000 school
districts, a considerable, and to some a prohibative factor - cost.
Sure, lets just have all the students go online to the nearest IP node,
whether it is long distance or not (and the calls are local for less
than half the 40 students in the course I outlined) and be on there for
30 minute sessions each time ( thats brain-rate, whatever the baud rate
is) at $22 an hour direct cost, twice a week minimum, for 16 weeks.
Thats 'only' $6,640 direct telephone costs for this single 40 student
course, just for student online time, and if they log on directly to
very economical Colorado Supernet, thats another $640 to CSN. Compared
with the estimated $800 total this course will cost, or $80 per school.
So when, in another message you say that keeping 'costs' down is the
reason you have implemented Slip and PPP, what costs?
