[629] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Perhaps dismissal of packet radio in the classroom is unwarranted
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Sean Donelan)
Wed Apr 24 23:45:07 1991
Date: Wed, 24 Apr 1991 22:45:29 CDT
From: SEAN@dranet.dra.com (Sean Donelan)
To: com-priv@psi.com
X-Vmsmail-To: SMTP%"com-priv@psi.com"
>On the other hand this technology does not lend itself to tying more
>outlying facilities together. When the mention of radio links first
>came up I got the feeling that we were talking about linking outlying
>schools to a central site, perhaps a distance of 10 miles or so for an
>urban or suburban area. Unfortunately the same technology that makes
>the classroom-to-classroom link possible won't stretch to 10 mi links.
This is exactly what drives up the cost. You aren't talking about
LAN's anymore, and WAN technology for connecting LANs doesn't come
out very well when you are only connecting a few ports at several
different locations.
As you go down the education ladder, the campuses become smaller and more
disperse. It gets real expensive to link a fifty buildings when they
are spread out over a hundred square miles. It gets worse outside of
the major metro areas when the distances grow.
The cable-TV systems offer something, since most community's franchise
agreements reserved few channels for community services. But they didn't
set a level for the quality of service, so they can be be pretty poor.
The phone company's have all kinds of bizzare services. Get CO-LAN which
is essentially a 19.2 data circuit with an RS-232 plug for $100 a port.
Maybe we can get CHANNEL-ONE to give the schools the computers and
communications equipment. Then ANS could get IBM to give them the Prodigy
software, and for just exposing the kids to 2 minutes of commercials every
time they turned on the computer.... :-)
--
Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO 63132-1806
Domain: sean@dranet.dra.com, Voice: (Work) +1 314-432-1100
