gnu@toad.com (09/26/90)
EE Times, Sept 24 1990, p. 28. My comments are [indented]. "Industry forms NSFnet support group" by Brian Robinson Washington - The government's High Performance Computing Program, which has yet to receive any formal funding, got a boost from industry last week. Three companies that have headed industry's effort in the development of NSFnet are sponsoring a new organization that will provide support for any network built as a part of the program. The new, not-for-profit company, Advanced Network and Services, Inc (ANS) will manage NSFnet under contract to current network manager Merit Inc. IBM Corp and MCI Communications Corp., which have worked with Merit for several years to refit the NSFnet, will provide cash and R&D for the venture. ANS's first job will be to connect more academic, industrial and government institutions to NSFnet, which is being boosted from a speed of 1.5Mbits/second to a T3 performance of 45 Mbits/s. Longer term, the company would provide support for the National Research and Education Network. A major focus of the computing program, the NREN is intended to link thousands of research and academic centers nationwide. NSFnet will be the backbone for the NREN. The government first proposed its $1.9 billion plan for the High Performance Computing Program late last year. The program is an ambitious attempt to build a coherent, nationwide infrastructure that will provide industry, government and academic participants with access to high-performance computing facilities. A similar program has been proposed in Congress, and legislative action on that proposal is expected sometime next year. [When will "industry" actually get to participate in this network? It sure can't now...] Even with the big boost in bandwidth -- from just 56 kbits/s two years ago -- the current increase in demand threatens to overwhelm NSFnet, said Allan Weis, president and chief executive of ANS and a former executive of IBM. In the last year alone, the number of sites connected to the network has tripled, and user traffic has increased by more than 500 percent. [If I gave away free bandwidth to anyone unscrupulous enough to break the rules, kept upgrading when people took advantage of me, and never policed them, my network traffic would be increasing exponentially, too.] ANS focus ANS will focus on managing that growth. "The success of ANS will also expand the base of financial support for the evolving financial network" [sic], said Weis. MCI and IBM will both donate $5 million over three years, and fees will also be collected from users. All of that funding will be reinvested in network development, freeing up other funds to sign on needier organizations that otherwise could not afford to get on NSFnet. [Total of $3.3M/year doesn't even come close to the cost of running the network...especially at T3. That will just about pay for office space and salaries for MCI and IBM "ex-executives" who will run ANS. The actual network funding come out of the taxpayers' pockets, as usual. The "needier organizations" stuff is designed to distract your attention from this.] While neither IBM nor MCI will derive revenue from ANS, both see it as an opportunity to develop and test new communications technologies in a real-world setting. The two companies will be able to license any new techologies ANS develops. [Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold the Moon" comes to mind. Tycoon D. D. Harriman gets a United Nations charter for a nonprofit company to explore the Moon. But that nonprofit is controlled by him, and it subcontracts everything to his "real companies with hair on their chests", who make significant profits. In this case, there are two fake nonprofits shielding the for-profits (Merit and ANS). At least in Heinlein's case, the whole thing is funded by private owners, rather than by robbing the taxpayers.] IBM sees its participation as an important means for testing new techniques and configurations of networking hardware and software. It already supplies hardware and software for NSFnet's backbone switching and routing systems. MCI, meanwhile, supplies the 1.5-Mbit/s T1 network through which NSFnet now operates, and officials expect ANS to be a test bed for work on ISDN and braodband Synchronous Optical Networks (Sonet). MCI recently tested a 2.4 Gbit/s Sonet system, and the company expects that technology to be the basis for a future, multi-gigabit NREN based om optical fibers. [Who will supply the T3 links? MCI? I find this a curious omission.] Nonetheless, officials stressed that the company will be only a small part of the full High Performance Computing Program. It will not have the resources to implement a full NREN, which will require a much broader effort from industry, government and academia. [In other words, IBM and MCI aren't interested in FUNDING the development of a nationwide high speed commercial network. They just want to come in later and cherry-pick, managing the resulting for-profit network, after it's been built "non-profit" and paid for by tax money.] Even so, the company may have a head start in any upcoming competition for future management of NSFnet and, ultimately, of the NREN. [Tell me about it...] -- end of news story --
schoff@PSI.COM ("Martin Lee Schoffstall") (09/26/90)
Well, I'm hoping to learn what you really think about this privately, I really hate the way you held back :-) The EE Times article is extremely wide of the mark, its interpretation that this is "a boost", might be countered by many dozens of organizations who think ANS has targetted the mid-level infrastructure and put it in jeopardy at a very interesting point in time for the NREN. This is pure coincidence of course. > [When will "industry" actually get to participate in this > network? It sure can't now...] I think by your participation in ALTERNET and other commercial companies particpation in PSINet, industry is participating in the Internet, and in my opinion using the right providers: commercial providers. What PSINet has been doing (and from all appearances what ALTERNET has been doing) is working with industry and not upsetting the stability of the non-profit mid-levels from providing service to the non-profits and academics. That non-profit infrastrucuture seemed pointless to hurt since too much of the US is incredibly dependant on it. At least I thought it was pointless. Now when the non-profits provide service to industry is where we get into a sticky philosophical/legal/taxation areas. This has led to a number of misunderstandings and conflicts that I'm sure now pale into insignificance now that someone has said that they are after their bread&butter. People are smart enough to stay away from those big German shepards but when they think they've set up a nice pastoral enviornment for their kids with sheep in the backyard, and the sheep are really something else, then you have real problems. I think that the neatest thing I got out of the transcripts from ANS's press conference were questions on the NSFNet joint work being renewed past its first five years, which is 92? Taking a moderate interpretation of this, is that the free national network is soon to be gone. This confirms other rumblings that I had heard from other sources. So in some sense it maybe worse than you think. Marty --------------------