[8724] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: One-way Internet?..no, it's "Asymetric"
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dick St.Peters)
Wed Dec 1 19:16:14 1993
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 93 19:12:15 EST
From: stpeters@spare-parts.crd.ge.com (Dick St.Peters)
To: walkerl@iscmed.med.ge.com
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
> From: walkerl@iscmed.med.ge.com (Larry Walker x5-8262)
> Agreed, but asymetric doesn't help me get cheap data connections to
> hospitals for service purposes: The hospital is the "home cable
> customer", and I want them to send megs of images and error logs back
> up stream to the cable head-end (and thence over the Internet to our
> National Support Center).
Larry, I'm with you. When we last went over this topic on the net,
hospitals were among my examples of information providers for whom the
assymmetric model was not appropriate. The context at the time was
sending images out to radiologists (as a prominent subset of sending
patient info to physicians) and sending billing info. Your service
info needs are additional reason; we are working to provide further
reason for physicians to need high bandwidth from hospitals.
> 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?
Yep, sure does. But for the millions of rural people badly underserved
by the healthcare system and who will wait a long time for cheap links
with high bi-directional bandwidth, it means even they can offer
physicians high-bandwidth access to the net. I maintain that this will
play an important role in overcoming the intellectual isolation that is
a major reason so few physicians choose to practice in rural regions.
Cable and telephone go just about everywhere.
Your sister may have to move to town :-)
--
Dick St.Peters
GE Corporate R&D, Schenectady, NY stpeters@dawn.crd.ge.com
