IP: SF Chron reports students asked to pay for Internet

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

From: Craig Partridge <craig () aland bbn com>
Date: Fri, 03 Nov 95 09:46:05 -0800






Today's San Francisco Chronicle reports that U.C. Berkeley and the California
State University System have both signed with ISPs to provide Internet
accounts to their students.  The Berkeley deal is with NETCOM and is
a supplement to Berkeley's free dial-in service, which apparently is
overloaded and oversubscribed.  The idea is that if students want better
service, they sign up with NETCOM (the deal is $14.95 per month for 40
hours of primetime and unlimited off-peak time).  The CSU deal (with
Sprint) is less clearly described but sounds like rather than wire
campuses, CSU is saying go buy an account from Sprint.  (Pricing is
$12.50 per month for 70 hours of prime time and 90 hours non-prime time
per month).


The article states that other universities (Stanford and Harvard) are named,
are also looking into such deals. (As a Stanford-affiliated person,
this is the first I've heard of it for Stanford, and I'd be surprised if this
were true, as Stanford has wired all dorms with Ethernet and the net seems
to have capacity, so demand for additional service is presumably low.
Similarly, all houses and halls at Harvard are or will soon be, fully wired.
And for both Harvard and Stanford, all or almost all undergrads live on
campus).  Still, as a way of off-loading costs of maintaining a campus
network, I wouldn't be surprised if this was the start of a trend.


Craig


PS: On the same page (1st page of business section) it was pointed out that
Netscape closed at 98 1/4 yesterday, which means the company is valued at
$4 billion (yes, with a 'b'), more than such established companies as Delta
Airlines, Hilton Hotels and Nordstroms...