[8725] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: One-way Internet?..no, it's "Asymetric"
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dick St.Peters)
Wed Dec 1 20:14:25 1993
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 93 20:05:18 EST
From: stpeters@spare-parts.crd.ge.com (Dick St.Peters)
To: fitz@wang.com
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
> From: Tom Fitzgerald <fitz@wang.com>
> > (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.
Tom, Larry's right.
You've got the wrong scenario, or more precisely a wrong scenario.
Radiologists don't look at images from a repository of any kind very
often, and especially not on holidays and at 10:00 PM. On holidays and
off-hours, she will be a radiologist on call looking at an image from
an ER that was just taken.
On a normal workday, she'll be at the office reviewing images taken
that day and transmitted to her practice as soon as they're taken.
(However Radiology is a practice in for a lot of change, and there's
going to be a lot less saving up of images for assembly-line reading at
the end of the day and a lot more reading as they come in [and a lot
more reading per radiologist, I suspect]).
Small clinics have been dealing with storing images on computers for
years now with none of the "redundant everything" you describe, except
possibly a UPS, which isn't that big a deal. The expensive people on
call are their friendly GE (or <fill in the blank>) field service folks.
> 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.
Even if you store the data somewhere else, you still have to get it
there. Clinics and hospital produce a lot of data, and they're going
to need decent outgoing bandwidth. I think they're going to need a
*lot* of bandwidth.
--
Dick St.Peters
GE Corporate R&D, Schenectady, NY stpeters@dawn.crd.ge.com
