[9579] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: AUPs and Connectivity
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Martin L. Schoffstall)
Wed Jan 12 12:55:47 1994
Date: Wed, 12 Jan 1994 12:53:58 +0000
From: "Martin L. Schoffstall" <schoff@psi.com>
To: Stephen Wolff <steve@nsf.gov>, Lars Poulsen <lars@eskimo.cph.cmc.com>
Cc: com-priv@psi.com, mstrange@fonorola.net
Steve,
I'm sorry but I can't but into this. I was there for both the transitions
and I remember them as technical/operational challenges.
How many regionals are there that need time? 50? You tell me the number.
What you are saying is that 50 organizations need another year to generate a
PO. It isn't worth another $1x million dollars, another year of tilting the
marketplace et al. to train up their purchasing agents.
The technical challenge is negligible compared to the other two transitions,
the technology and experience level is more than up to the challenge.
I'm glad that I never believed in the date, and I'm far from a minority of
one in that. Imagine allocating precious resources preparing for this and
hearing "just kidding".
Imagine an entrepeunaral(sp?) company girding themselves up to a real
sophisticated, real state of the art, 21st century solution to the
solicitation. You have let them down, and I'll bet they won't bother next
time.
This is the end of your opportunity to lead. What you are going to buy in
the future is "old stuff" from the old-line thinkers, the people who can deal
with the government process instead of the future possabilities.
Congratulations on squandering the American lead, I think Europe and the
PacRim get to laugh into their hankies now. The headline should read from
Tokyo to Berlin "America invests $15M for state of the art procurement
specialists".
Marty
PS: on a more positive note, congrats on having BA/TCI commit to the
challenge of hooking up the K-12. What I've heard from you in the past
on library and school access solving the problem of the haves and have-nots
is coming about due to yours and others work.
> It's not ANS alone that needs the year. It's the regionals + ANS/
> Merit. We (NSF) need to get money to the regionals, they need to
> conduct their competitive procurements from the transit service
> providers and, when they turn up, start transitioning the routes off
> the current Backbone Service to their individual new arrangements.
>
> You remember the last "flag day", right? When we switched to TCP
> in 1983?
> The net was a LOT smaller then, but even so the "instantaneous"
> transition took the better part of eight months and was accompanied by
> massive service disruptions.
>
> By contrast, the last NSFNET transition (T1->T3) took also several
> months and (modulo the T3 technology being not quite ready for prime
> time) went moderately smoothly (for some value of moderately) as routes
> were
> transitioned a few at a time. And that was in a network at least two
> orders of magnitude larger than in 1983 by almost any measure (nets,
> traffic, hosts, bitrate,...).
>
> In a net that's grown even bigger since then, I cannot imagine the
> forthcoming transition being done any other way. We've told both Merit
> and the regionals that stability of service to the networked community
> is NSF's first priority during the transition.
>
>
> > To my naive ears, the talk of funding a graceful shutdown of NSFnet
> > sounds like bridging until vBNS can take over. Letting vBNS assume
> > the same old role as the default backbone, seems like a prescription
> > for endless grief.
>
> Nope. The vBNS is NOT be a general-purpose transit backbone; that
> would indeed engender enduring, if not endless, grief.
>
> -s
>
>
