[2149] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: low-end users
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Roy Tennant)
Tue Jan 28 17:05:03 1992
Date: Tue, 28 Jan 92 14:03:13 PST
From: rtennant@library.Berkeley.EDU (Roy Tennant)
To: com-priv@psi.com
>Can we add 100-500 dialup sites and still provide an adequate level of
>services to all of our clients, given the amount of money we generate
>from dialup clients.
Please forgive me if I am off-base here (a not unlikely position), but
most of the regional networks have received sizeable chunks of change
for networking from the National Science Foundation. Is it really
too much to ask, then, that the *primary goal* of such organizations
be to serve the research and education networking needs of their region?
Should this not just include major universities, but also smaller
educational institutions? Community colleges, high schools, libraries?
Hasn't anyone ever heard of using some services to subsidize others?
No one seemed to know or care that AT&T used long distance rates
(a high-end service for which people should rightly pay) to subsidize
local dialing (a low-end but vital service) until it was too late to do
anything about it. Now folks who formerly were unable to afford long
distance calling but could at least afford local calls now can't do either.
So this is progress?
I am merely suggesting that before we write off the high schools
and public libraries that don't have the big bucks to plunk down for
simple e-mail and telnet service, that we take another look at what
we are doing and why. Perhaps there is another way to do things.
Roy Tennant
UCB Library
