Interesting People mailing list archives
IP: an apology to the administration
From: Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>
Date: Wed, 06 Nov 1996 14:48:02 -0500
After re-reading the White House announcement of the President's speech .. namely: " Connect universities and national labs with high-speed networks that are 100 - 1000 times faster than today's Internet: These networks will connect at least 100 universities and national labs at speeds that are 100 times faster than today's Internet, and a smaller number of institutions at speeds that are 1,000 times faster. These networks will eventually be able to transmit the contents of " If indeed the average data rate of a campus is now 1.44 per second, then it is proposed to increase that at a minimum to 144 (155) megabits per second up to 1.5 gigabits/sec (my guess is that is that means 650 mega bits per second). The second part of this implies gigabit speeds in the range of 1.2 gigabits per second. I assume that also means a program in and a focus on networking research on the issues of architecture, software and hardware, that are raised by speeds like this. One of the lessons from the Gigabit testbed effort is that even at 620 there are real difficulties interfacing to our workstations and their operating systems. With those goals -- namely competitive VBNS level connectivity to 100 (hopefully plus) campuses and a research program to explore the higher speed domains, a number of my concerns vanish. But I still have concerns about organization, funding (short and long term), campus infrastructure (can most campuses afford to rebuild their infrastructure), the AUP issue and many others (including competitive procurement for supplying the facilities) but at least from the political perspective the track is right.
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- IP: an apology to the administration Dave Farber (Nov 06)