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Date: Tue, 30 Apr 91 10:19:42 -0400 From: adamg@world.std.com (Adam M Gaffin) To: com-priv@uu.psi.com I attended a conference at Boston University last week on NREN. As an NREN novice, I found it very informative, but also a bit disturbing (enough so to write something for my paper's business section :-) ). Stephen Wolff from the NSF and Kenneth King of Educom both went on at considerable length about the benefits of the project (you know: doctors swapping X-rays, researchers using distant supercomputers to plumb the mysteries of the universe and that little girl in Tennessee browsing the catalog at the Library of Congress). Wolff essentially said he sees the government's role in all this as setting the network up, getting everything settled and then turning it all over to private industry (he said it more eloquently than that, and with a bit more humor than that, though). As Wolff noted, there is now an established, and growing commercial interest in Internet-like services (PSI, for example) and high-speed data networks (Nynex is working on a pilot 45-Mbps system with some Boston teaching hospitals). If that is the case, then, wouldn't Gore's bill really just amount to a huge subsidy for whichever companies (IBM and MCI?) lucky enough to get the contract to run NREN? If commercial clients are demanding high-speed data services, won't some company come along and provide it for them? Given that such a network has some potentially lucrative bonuses (digital TV transmission, anyone?), why should taxpayers pay for this? After all, this isn't 1969, when nobody thought there was any future in packet networks. Wolff said the government is going to wind up subsidizing any high-speed network no matter what, because the researchers at whom it will first be aimed would only include the costs of network access in future grant proposals. Maybe, but shouldn't the companies that stand to benefit the most from this privatization pay more of the upfront costs? Or am I all wet on this? Thanks! Adam Gaffin Middlesex News, Framingham, Mass. adamg@world.std.com Voice: (508) 626-3968. Fred the Middlesex News Computer: (508) 872-8461
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