[9129] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: anyone for an Internet buying coop?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU ((John Sechrest))
Sat Dec 18 14:23:31 1993
To: Miles R Fidelman <fidelman@civicnet.org>
Cc: nii_agenda@civicnet.org, com-priv@psi.com, communet@nysernet.org
In-Reply-To: Your message of Sat, 18 Dec 93 13:25:07 EST.
Date: Sat, 18 Dec 1993 10:46:36 -0800
From: (John Sechrest) <sechrest@jasmic.com>
--------
Miles R Fidelman <fidelman@civicnet.org> writes:
% There's been a lot of traffic recently about the difficulties small
% Internet providers, FreeNets, etc. have in acquiring Internet service for
% resale and/or at a good price. It strikes me that this indicates a crying
% need for banding together to aggregate buying power.
I wholly agree. Having a buying opportunity for IP resale is something
that will help things.
I would like to tell you about a few things that are happening here in
Oregon. The Oregon State University Computer Science Outreach Services
is working to deploy a Metropolitan network. It will be a low speed
IP network for the Corvallis area and perhaps most of Southern Oregon.
We call this the Corvallis Metronet Project.
We have 2 options for IP services. NWnet has recently created the notion
of an Aggregate provider. For $5000/year (additional) and then some
cost per line that redistributes IP to another group, you can pass
IP services downstream. This is a major change for NWnet and is
one way that the state department of Education is able to distribute
IP to the schools around the state.
Our second option is to join with Rainnet up in portland and the
Tiny garden in SF to make a connection to the CIX. I believe that
the Rainnet/TG connection is being finallized this month.
We are likely to make a connection with Rainnet due to various local
details that are not really important to explain now, but it is important
to explain that we have over 10 organizations working together in Corvallis
to deploy IP services across the community. We are able to redistribute
IP because we have found partners that are working with us to help
us do it. Without the ability to distribute IP services, the notion
of community networking (or really community MAN's , since networking
is being mis-used) is difficult to do.
We are waiting on some contracts to be completed and passed around
and then Corvallis Metronet will move forward to deploy hardware and
to make our IP connection to the network. This joint partnership
to create an IP network is only possible because we do have the ability
to redistribute IP.
If you can not redistribute IP, then a buying coop may be the way to
drive that opportunity forward.
% There are quite a few precendents for such things:
%
% - in the early days of electrification, rural communities often organized
% their own electric coops to either build generators or generate enough
% demand for commercial companies to enter their markets
There was the Rural datafication conference in Chicago last year.
It was a valuable experience for CICnet to put together. It would
be valuable if we had a national Rural Datafication project.
OSU CSOS is working to make the network accessible by rural Oregon.
It would be nice to have a stronger national committment to this
idea.
% So... If there are any FreeNets, public access Unix systems, civic
% networks, libraries, schools, etc. who would like to be parties to such an
% effort, please let me know. If there's enough interest, I see us
% collaborating to write an RFP that meets the needs of participants, and
% then putting it on the street to PSI, Alternet, ANS, Sprint, MCI, AT&T,
% the regionals, etc. If there are any vendors who'd like to respond to such
% an RFP - you can let me know too :). I also expect that we'd be eligible
% for some of the upcoming Federal networking funds - as a way to defray
% startup expenses and allow us to maintain a lower average price during
% rampup.
Certainly this is an important thing to do. It will help move
things forward.
-----
John Sechrest . Internet: sechrest@jasmic.com
Jasmic Systems .
2140 SW 49th .
Corvallis Oregon 97333 .
(503) 758-6430 .
