[8749] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: One-way Internet?..no, it's "Asymetric"
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Christopher Zguris)
Thu Dec 2 22:41:20 1993
Date: Thu, 2 Dec 93 20:27 EST
From: Christopher Zguris <0004854540@mcimail.com>
To: com priv <com-priv@psi.com>
Barney Wolff <barney@databus.com> writes:
>The issue for me is who will pay for the extra cost of making all services
>symmetric. I don't for a minute believe that this extra cost will come
>out of the cable co's bottom line. Instead, the price of the service will
>be higher, hurting all those who do not themselves need symmetric service.
>(And I repeat that asymmetric does not mean one-way.)
>
>EFF, how about some further comments on this issue?
Assuming we get past cable co's short-term near-sighted logic, wouldn't
the goal be to built a system that people would find of value and thus pay
to use thus providing the funding? How did AT&T build up a network that
covers the world, through providing a service people want and are willing to
pay for. There is no way I would pay to build up the cable co's system if
it's sole purpose was to provide me with what they want me to see, that's
not any sort of information superhighway. The goal should be to include
sufficient capacity/flexibility to provide me services like better access to
the internet (or whatever it may evolve into), video transmission, and
numerous other services that I cannot begin to imagine. Using the analogy of
the telephone system, I doubt its' original planners had any idea of the
diversity of its future use by commercial users- and these commercial users
provide the capital to run the system. With the rapid move toward LAN's and
the need to move data around (across the city, country, world) I think there
would be great demand for an information superhighway flexible enough to
handle those needs, and that commercial demand translates into money to help
finance the system (and also makes that financing dependant on the required
system flexibility). Of course, whether or not the cable tv industry has the
motivation to go to anything beyond "super pay-per-view" is debatable.
Christopher Zguris
CZGURIS@MCIMAIL.COM
