[9834] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
re: Internet "PayPhones"
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Sean McLinden)
Sat Jan 22 14:11:03 1994
Date: Sat, 22 Jan 1994 13:52:24 -0500 (EST)
From: Sean McLinden <sean@dsl.pitt.edu>
To: Larry Walker <walkerl@med.ge.com>
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: <9401221825.AB09770@iscmed.med.ge.com>
On Sat, 22 Jan 1994, Larry Walker wrote:
> How much more sane to have public phone terminals that would allow me to
> plug right in and dial a local phone number to a PPP login on a local
> router, and go Internet around the world to my email server!
The concept of a "Data Dialtone" has been around for a long time (I can
remember discussions about it 10 years ago), and an real implementation
might even have been forthcoming if it weren't for the fact that most of
the Telco's seemed unwilling or unable to do anything where there wasn't
a guaranteed market up front. As little as three years ago, I was talking
with Bell Atlantic about putting an ISDN switch in our C.O., and was told
that they would do it only if we could promise them a certain volume over
a fixed number of years. Geez, guys, how about doing a little marketing,
yourselves!
The difficulty with even something like PPP/SLIP is the unfortunate fact
that the next *big* segment of the market is comprised of people who use
network services but don't think of it in that way, like the voice mail
and FAX users. And the reason that they view these differently is that
the most they need to know is what is the phone number of the connection
in the wall and that of the person that I want to reach (and I only need
that until I get an automatic dialer).
Recently I evaluated an RFP from a hospital that routed order and lab
slips through a "network" of 65 FAX machines. They wanted to covert the
bitmapped data into something that could be input into a spreadsheet or a
database and they were considering getting FAX cards for their PCs and
then buying OCR software to handle the conversion. The real irony was
that most of the information was already in an electronic format, printed
to paper, hand edited, and then FAXed.
But the important point was that hard as I tried, I could not get them to
think that the solution was a data network, per se. The FAX was a logical
extension of the voice network and the FAX cards an extension of that
same voice network and the documents which appeared on their screens were
just the little slips of paper that shoot out from the FAX machine though
now they were on the "disk" (most of the customers constantly confused
"memory" and "storage" so I didn't even bother trying to explain more, here).
The point is, that the issue is more than just an RJ connector in the
wall. It is network access so simple to use that you just plug your
system in and say "I want to send this to George" and it does it. These
people (and there is a huge market out there), don't even want to know
how it is done. They don't, necessarily, want Prodigy or Genie or
Internet because they can't be sure that this service will let them get
to where they want to go, but they *know* the phone will let them do it.
So what's the answer for them?
Sean
