[8723] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: One-way Internet?..no, it's "Asymetric"
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Tom Fitzgerald)
Wed Dec 1 18:12:34 1993
From: Tom Fitzgerald <fitz@wang.com>
To: walkerl@iscmed.med.ge.com (Larry Walker x5-8262)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 93 18:10:56 EST
Cc: stpeters@spare-parts.crd.ge.com, com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: <9312012233.AA17177@iscmed.med.ge.com>; from "Larry Walker x5-8262" at Dec 1, 93 4:33 pm
> For individual households, the asymetric model may be ok (or may not be:
> My sister wants to be able to do video art, and broadcast her own "Liquid
> TV" shows), but for a cheap, ubiquitous link to many kinds of commercial
> users, it falls down, doesn't it? (In your first example, where is the
> radiologist getting the images from? A master image-repository hung on the
> backbone, or from a community clinic in a rural town 200 miles away? I
> think the latter.)
I don't. Is the community clinic also going to have operations people
working 3 shifts to make *absolutely* sure the systems are up 24 hours a
day, 7 days a week including holidays? They'll need redundant everything -
mirrored disks, spare CPUs, UPSs, redundant telecom lines, etc, and
expensive technical people on call all the time. Your radiologist will be
really unhappy if she gets "server not responding" for 12 hours because a
disk fried at the community clinic at 10:00 PM.
Even if a clinic is willing to pay for this, is your sister? She'll lose
customers if she doesn't.
I suspect both the clinic and your sister will rent space on a local data
warehouse like MSEN ($0.50/Meg/month last time I checked - Ed V can correct
me). They'll have invested in the support staff and redundant hardware to
run everything. Your sister can upload her stuff once at 1/100th of
realtime, if necessary, and all her customers can download it from there,
in realtime, dozens at a time, guaranteed.
Things are OK as long as there are no political or procedural restrictions
against getting high-bandwidth outgoing links. They can be expensive as
heck, as long as all producers are paying the same price and there are no
barriers, so anyone can enter the market any time demand rises. This is
really why its a really bad idea to have one company owning a substantial
chunk of both programming and delivery in any area.
Very, very few people or organizations will want high-bandwidth outgoing
feeds, unless they're amazingly cheap. The companies that do want them
will be the ones in the data storage and shipping business - odds are
extremely high that everyone else will be able to rent space from a data
storage company far more cheaply than they could provide it themselves,
and get better service besides.
My cousin owned a building supply company for a while, but he didn't put a
loading dock on the back of his house, he got space in an industrial park,
like anyone in that situation would.
--
Tom Fitzgerald Wang Labs, Lowell MA, USA fitz@wang.com 1-508-967-5278
