[8730] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: One-way Internet?..no, it's "Asymetric"
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (barney@databus.com)
Wed Dec 1 23:25:04 1993
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 93 23:13:26 -0500
From: barney@databus.com
To: walkerl@iscmed.med.ge.com (Larry Walker x5-8262)
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).
>
>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 think the asymmetric model needs to be universal, just useful.
My sense is that the cable/phone offering is targeted to home/small biz
anyway, and I don't think even a rather small hospital is for this
purpose a small business. We're talking about how to get the monthly
cost down well below $500 for a connection that offers high bandwidth
in at least one direction.
The debate is not whether all users can be satisfied with an asymmetric
(hi inbound, lo outbound) connection but whether such an offering is so
harmful that EFF is justified in, as I read their position, saying that
the US government must not allow it. Given that there _is_ a reverse
path, and I can use to post my diatribes, I think that position is
untenable.
I think the dreadful error would be to allow only one way to get to my
house, or to have all the ways controlled by one company/consortium/cabal.
Barney Wolff, Pres. Voice: 914-591-6572
Databus Inc. Fax: 914-591-5677
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