[2254] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: NREN: whither connectivity
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Kent W. England)
Mon Feb 3 09:20:45 1992
From: "Kent W. England" <kwe2@BBN.COM>
To: brian@lloyd.com
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: <9201262115.AA13448@ray.lloyd.com>
Date: Wed, 29 Jan 92 21:18:20 EDT
>From: brian@lloyd.com (Brian Lloyd)
>
>One of the things that people seem to be forgetting are patterns of
>access. Most of the requirements are for local and regional capacity,
>not contenental and global capacity. If you use the average campus or
>corporation as a model, the demand for bandwidth is local and the
>requirements for intercampus or intercompany capacity is more limited,
>at least using the current crop of applications (I know, new
>applications MAY change this).
>
New applications are essential to changing this.
Internet users in the Boston metro area have had access to a 10Mbps
backbone (nine links among seven sites), including Harvard, MIT, Boston
University, and Thinking Machines for over three years. This backbone
could easily be bumped up to 20Mbps with the addition of a few more
Ethernet ports and use of the transmit interface hack that cisco did for
NEARnet back when the Ethernet microwave was set up.
Are people using this bandwidth? Largely not, there simply are not the
applications or affinity groups extant to make it happen.
AFS could do it. Personal videoconferencing could help. But just
building the pipes is not enough, as the NEARnet high-speed core proves.
It was serendipitous that this technology was easy and cost effective to
deploy in this situation compared to the T1 alternative.
--Kent
