[8742] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: One-way Internet?..no, it's "Asymetric"
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Larry Walker)
Thu Dec 2 17:09:13 1993
Date: Thu, 2 Dec 93 16:09:29 CST
To: com-priv@psi.com
From: walkerl@med.ge.com (Larry Walker)
Cc: barbiauxb@med.ge.com, ross@med.ge.com, georgeg@med.ge.com,
Tom Fitzgerald <fitz@wang.com> said:
>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.
You're absolutely right about my sister. On reflection is was a poorly
chosen analagy. Thanks for the interesting concept of having a "local data
waehouse": sort of a Community CD Jukebox server.
>
But as Dick St. Peters points out, hospitals (at least) are a special case
where the terminal node generates significant amounts of data to be served
up to <somewhere>. Think of a small office of freelance AutoCAD jockeys. At
100x compression on uploads, a 3 minutes video clip takes order of 5 hours
to upload. Not Satisfactory.
But whoever said it is right: Asymetric has it's place in the
cost/performance continuum; I just would hate to see a nearly-ubiquitous
service like cable TV go through a major plant upgrade and have to _settle_
for an asymetric datafeed into how-may-score-hundreds-of-millions of homes
and offices.
Larry
