[2104] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Costs?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Brian Lloyd)
Mon Jan 27 01:08:05 1992
Date: Sun, 26 Jan 92 22:06:04 PST
From: brian@lloyd.com (Brian Lloyd)
To: daveh@csn.org
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: Dave Hughes's message of Sun, 26 Jan 1992 19:23:50 -0700 <199201270223.AA21896@teal.csn.org>
Reply-To: brian@lloyd.com
Date: Sun, 26 Jan 1992 19:23:50 -0700
From: Dave Hughes <daveh@csn.org>
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.
Uh, I am on your side, you know, the side that is interested in
providing connectivity to schools everywhere. ;-)
I think maybe you misunderstood some of what I was saying. I am not
advocating that all the students interact with a remote system using
TELNET or FTP all the time. The students interact with their local
computer to read news and mail as usual. The local computer uses
dial-up SLIP/PPP to communicate with the rest of the network. For
mail there is no significant change in costs, neither is there any
significant change in cost for receiving news. The only time the cost
changes is if there is unplanned connectivity to use FTP or TELNET.
Even so, the availability of such services is an advantage that is
unavailable with uucp or FIDO and therefore probably offsets the
additional cost.
Now we get back to the point I made in one of my previous postings
(NREN: whither connectivity): we need basic connectivity more than we
need gigabit networks. Perhaps it would make sense for some of the
NREN money to go toward reducing the costs to the schools by providing
funds to locate dial-up points-of-presence (POPs) near concentrations
of primary and secondary students so that we can reduce or eliminate
the long-distance charges.
Brian Lloyd, WB6RQN Lloyd & Associates
Principal and Network Architect 3420 Sudbury Road
brian@lloyd.com Cameron Park, CA 95682
voice (916) 676-1147 -or- (415) 725-1392
