[8917] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Scenarios: a response to Marvin
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Gordon Cook)
Sun Dec 12 14:35:36 1993
From: cook@path.net (Gordon Cook)
Date: Sun, 12 Dec 1993 11:35:03 PST
To: com-priv@psi.com
Marvin says:
"It's worth pointing out that the $18 million that NSF said it will spend as
part of its resolicitation is for all aspects of the new scheme
- the VBNS
- the Routing Arbiter
- the NAPS
- four year phaseout of funding to Regionals
No new "backbone provider" is going to get $18 million."
Well Marvin please check what I said:
"Problem is if the winner were announced tomorrow, I have yet to hear anyone who
believes that the new network **infrastructure** could be ready for an
operational switch over by May 1."
and
"Now NSF has a budget that it itself estimated as 18 million a year for the NEW
infrastructure" My operative word is INFRASTRUCTURE, *not* backbone. Never
implied for a moment that any "backbone provider" was going to get $18 million."
I hammered on the individual components that you enumerate last week. In the
interest of brevity, rather than listing them all yet again, I had hoped that
infrastructure would be understood by readers here as covering all four of them.
I am trying to figure out how reports of NSF getting out of the backbone
business and withdrawing its financial support from the network can be squared
with an increase in overall NSF expenditures from 12 to 18 million a year -- an
increase which also appears not to take into account the necessity of dual
spending during a project switchover as described in my scenario A.
It is true that the backbone as we know it appears to be going away. This has
been pointed out many times and you do a very good job again of explaining it
again (although whether it might reappear as a part of the regional
interconnectivity component of the solicitation is not yet answered). I am
suggesting that we should all examine very carefully what is being put in its
place.
I think that your quite interesting scenario essentially is a longer term
extrapolation of what might come after the scenarios I describe. It leaves me
with two questions:
1. is the new NSF infrastructure something that will be conducive to the
survival only of very large and financially powerful national providers?
2. do you overlook all the specialized things that regionals do to support
their customers at levels 3 and above in the stack? Also what about regionals
knowing and being able to respond to their local customers better and more
effectively that folks like MFS or Sprint? (I'm recalling Mandelbaum's 1990
Harvard paper on the future of the regionals.)
