Cook report. Even though these are really advertisement for the Report, they ccontain enough info to be worth distributing

[David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

The September COOK Report on Internet -> NREN is published.

The lead article:  PSI SIGNS DEAL WITH CONTINENTAL CABLEVISION

PSI MOVE & AT&T PLANS LIKELY TO CHANGE FACE OF COMMERCIAL INTERNET SERVICES
INDUSTRY

A few isolated quotes:

PSI's CEO William Schrader, in a telephone interview with the Editor, said
that PSI would offer customers a turn-key service where PSI would take
responsibility for customer hookup and network management.  PSI would also
provide and install all hardware and software (which would be PSI equipment)
necessary for the delivery of the service. 
________

ANS Vice president Joel Maloff told the COOK Report:  "ANS CO+RE continues to
establish a variety of joint marketing and technology relationships with
various "facilities-based" vendors. These include IXC's and LEC's. Although we
have not concluded any agreements with cable TV providers, we will continue to
look for "partners" that offer potential synergy to our mission. . . ."
________

Since in any given area there is only one cable company, one should ask does
the first person to get a beach head in this market win?
Perhaps not.  There are alternatives.
_________
One thing is clear.  The pace of change is increasing and the stakes are very
high.  Not only from the positioning being done by PSI but also from AT&T's
efforts to make its own deals with the cable companies.  The Wall Street
Journal ran a story on Friday August 27 stating that AT&T "has been holding
talks with the nation's biggest cable-television  companies about linking
their customers into one big interactive multimedia network, according to
AT&T's new chief of multimedia products and services."
__________

According to the WSJ "AT&T's plans involve a comprehensive network plan from
AT&T Bell Laboratories.  It would tie the country's disparate cable systems
into one national network of common switching and transmission functions, said
Robert M. Kavner, executive vice president and chief of its Multimedia
Products and Services Group."

"By demonstrating the feasibility of the national interactive service, AT&T
hopes to sell the cable companies on its vision for tying everbody into one
network, not unlike the way the Bell System communicates via common standards
today."
____________

No wonder AT&T's Allen didn't want the government to build the Infrastructure
of NREN or NII.  This looks like AT&T's own version of the infrastructure.
_________

It is clearly in the interest of the Internet to maintain diversity of sources
for the local loop. 
____________________________________________________

ACCESS TO GOVERNMENT INFORMATION 

SOURCES OF AGREEMENT AND CONFLICT BETWEEN 
GOVERNMENT AGENCIES, INFORMATION VENDORS, AND LIBRARIANS

by Jamie Love
Special to the COOK Report

4 paragraphs from a 2500 word article:

HR629 - The Owens Bill

Data users, including the library community, have generally opposed any
legislation which would further promote the privatization of government
information.  Their preferred approach is HR 629, the "Improvement of
Information Access Act" (IIA Act), offered by Representative Major Owens
(D-NY), the only professional librarian in Congress.


Vendors Oppose 
Access Provisions of Owens Bill

Vendor groups have made it clear that they will oppose the access broadening
provisions of the Owens bill.  The vendor's bargaining position is pretty
strong.  Any legislation will have to pass the Senate Committee on Government
Affairs, chaired by Senator Glenn (D-OH), and the House Subcommittee on
Government Information, Justice and Agriculture, Chaired by Representative
Condit (D-CA).Glenn works closely with Mead Data Central, a local Ohio
concern. While Condit's views of these issues are not clear, the views of key
staffer Bob Gellman are well known.

Gellman, who has worked on the subcommittee for more than a decade (having
survived several chairman) wields tremendous power.  Gellman has been a
vigorous opponent of public access to government computer information systems,
and a promoter of vendor interests. Gellman has a close relationship with Ron
Plesser, a powerful vendor lobbyist (clients include Knight-Ridder, Mead Data
Central, D&B, etc.).

EFF and OMB Watch support the vendor position. The vendors have also been able
to work closely with Jerry Berman of EFF and Gary Bass from OMB Watch, both of
whom have good relationships with Gellman.  Both EFF and OMB Watch have
favored the legislative approach found in the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA),
over the Owens bill approach.  This has given the Vendors a much stronger
political base, since they can argue that the PRA is a "consensus" approach,
endorsed by "public interest" groups.
_____________________________
CONGRESSIONAL BUDGET OFFICE ISSUES 
ANALYSIS OF ECONOMIC AND TECHNOLOGICAL WEAKNESSES OF HPCC

> From the beginning of extended excerpts

In late June the Congressional Budget Office issued a study titled Promoting
High Performance Computing and Communications.  For this study the CBO was
asked by the Senate Commerce Committee to look at factors which might inhibit
HPCC technlogies from finding markets.  It found quite a few.  It contrasted
HPCC mission oriented goals (advancing the state of the possible) with the
goal of developing technology that could anticipate its own commercial market
any time soon.  These goals it found to be generally incompatible.  The COOK
Report offers some extended excerpts.

"New technologies often founder on the demand side, when the benefits they
offer seem not to be worth the added expense for most potential users." (page
xvi)
_________________________________________________________
An article focusing on
a discussion of network pricing schemes from com-priv

__________________________________________________________

And finally the concluding half of the special study 

CABLE TV VERSUS THE TELCOS:  WHO WILL BUILD AND CONTROL NATIONAL INFORMATION
INFRASTRUCTURE

The "boxed" quotes --

The fact that fiber interconnects so many points on the networks of local
exchange carriers has created a problem for the phone companies.  They have
the intelligent switching capability to connect any point to just about any
other point in the network -- something that the cable companies are now
beginning to long for.  Also, given the huge capacity of the fiber they have
laid, many strands are dark - that is to say they lie there unused.  When
these conditions are combined with the voice-versus-data state-level
regulatory anomaly, they create a new series of strains that are bringing new
woes to the RBOCs.
___________

George Gilder:  "Dark fiber threatens to gobble up their future as vendors of
broadband communications to offices, even as cable TV preempts them as
broadband providers to homes.  Since the Bells' profits on data are growing
some ten times as fast as their profits on voice telephony, they see dark
fiber as a menace to their most promising markets."
_____________

One has to suspect that the video dial tone developments could be holding
actions designed to gain the RBOCs time while Federal legislation and policy
changes make alliances and buy outs more feasible.  There is technical synergy
between the two that is likely to push developments in these directions.
______________

It may actually prove to be a better deal for RBOCs to invest in cable owned
CAPs outside their service areas than offering the new fast packet switching
technologies within their service areas.  "The cable industry doesn't fear the
telephone industry anymore.  When Bill Gates of Microsoft, John Sculley of
Apple, executives from IBM, DEC and just about every other computer company,
IXCs and leading edge RBOCs are beating down your door, you know you have won
the battle." -- Telestrategies Insight
______________

IBM will likely put in a bid for the vBNS component of the new NSFnet that the
NSF will find hard to turn down.  On the one hand the NSF will carefully
evaluate the "charity" (read cost sharing) of the IBM offer.  On the other
hand further impetus for accepting it will be found in the boost that such
action will give IBM as a provider of telecom switching equipment.  Helpfully
nudging the aging giant into new technology markets may be seen by some as a
desirable and much less costly outcome than letting IBM stand or fall on its
now out dated mainframe and Systems Network Architecture (SNA) merits.


_______________

"IBM hopes to have 4 PlaNet [Paris] nodes in place in Toronto . . .  Switches
will be connected by dark fiber that Rogers already has in place.  . . .
First test merely will connect data sources at IBM and Rogers, but Alan Baratz
[Director of the Paris development effort] said a 'third party,' probably
bank, would be added later in third quarter" of 1992."  What test would do,
according to Baratz, was turn a fiber based CATV network into one that could
carry digital data at the rate of a gigabit per second.

_____________

In the meantime IBM Vice President Lucie Fjeldstad had been hard at work
trying bring off a major IBM commitment to a national broadband data network.
As reported in the Wall St Journal last September the network would, in its
first three years, be used primarily for business purposes such as enabling
users of corporate LANs to do video. . . 


It begins to look like although there is considerable interest in IBM's
technology, the lean, mean and agile cable companies find IBM's style still
too cumbersome.  If this is an accurate conclusion, IBM ownership of the
NSFnet vBNS 155 megabit per second backbone could become an increasingly
attractive alternative.  Indeed with Fjeldstad's failure to launch her
broadband network and her subsequent retirement it could now be the only
alternative for IBM to have
______________

For the COOK Report Robert Berger has written an excellent review of Hybrid
Networks ethernet/internet over CATV technology.  He urges Hybrid to license
the rapid production of their hardware and software rather than try to become
directly involved in the provision of  network services.
______________

Coming in the October COOK Report -- a special report on INTERNET, NII and
Healthcare.

_______________________________________________________________
Gordon Cook, Editor Publisher:  COOK Report on Internet -> NREN
431 Greenway Ave, Ewing, NJ 08618
cook () path net                                   (609) 882-2572
_______________________________________________________________