[531] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Who Are the Viable Bidders on the NSFnet Backbone This Fall?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Edward Vielmetti)
Fri Apr 5 03:52:16 1991
To: tmn!cook@uunet.uu.net
Cc: com-priv@uu.psi.com
In-Reply-To: Your message of Wed, 03 Apr 00 19:91:02 +0000.
Date: Thu, 04 Apr 91 00:13:26 EST
From: Edward Vielmetti <emv@ox.com>
> Who then are the other telco's who could team up with a computer company
> to bid against ANS?? Surely there at least 1 or 2 that don't come to mind?
I doubt that anyone on the list who is preparing a bid will tip their
hand as to what they will do. MSEN, Inc. is not in a position to
solicit bids of this size at this time so I suppose I'm free to
speculate.
- getting bits from one end of the country to the other. There are
dozens or maybe hundreds of carriers who can tell you T1 circuits;
that's old hat, you can go to the lowest bidder there. There won't be
that many T3 vendors, but there's relatively not that much need for T3
service; it's not very likely that T3 to the campus is going to be the
normal state of affairs any time soon. So my prediction is that
whoever gets the NSFnet contract is going to have a strong offering in
services like Frame Relay or SMDS, and that that kind of technology
will be a relatively ubiquitous interconnection scheme in NREN.
- switching packets around. The router market is pretty competetive,
thank goodness; hopefully we'll get something better than 9 IBM RTs
stacked one one top of each other for the NSS systems in the NREN. I
would expect strong bids from several firms using technology from
cisco and Wellfleet, probably running on some kind of risc-based
platform (an article in networld world (1 april 1991) says that IBM
and Wellfleet are talking about using the Wellfleet software on the
RS/6000.) given how cheap some of these risc chips are, I would not
be surprised to see bids using other routers and relatively off the
shelf hardware (sparc cpus, 88k's, mips chips, etc.) who knows what
people will promise to get a bid!
- watching over the whole thing. there are a number of competent IP
organizations who would be up to running the NREN. I'd put BBN, PSI,
Alternet, Cerfnet (general atomics), the Nearnet folks, and perhaps a
few others which I have dropped by accident. Merit (in their role as
ANS contractor) will probably have a bid in. There will no doubt be
bids from telcos here too, either in cooperation with the existing ip
network service providers or trying to do things on their own.
Like I say, these are completely uninformed opinions, without any
benefit of inside knowlege about any of the organizations involved.
--
Msen Edward Vielmetti
/|--- moderator, comp.archives
emv@msen.com
"With all of the attention and publicity focused on gigabit networks,
not much notice has been given to small and largely unfunded research
efforts which are studying innovative approaches for dealing with
technical issues within the constraints of economic science."
RFC 1216
