Re: [nznog] What is this?

This issue was debated on this list about 2 and a half years back. Universities have a huge internal resource that they're not pushing out because of road blocks put in place by the telcos. Universities are also not very good publishers in their own right in this space if WAND is anything to go by as an example. As a community we need to build a new platfrom so that all providers can pair data in to it (I'd be supprised if anyone on this list would disagree with that point). In NZ Telecom has made it very clear that we have to focus on getting the internet off the telephone network. This means bypassing dsl and removing dialup completely. They made it very clear that increased internet growth on the telephone network has done nothing but harm to the network and is incuring huge costs. Further we also know that we need to focus on building a new telephone network on top of our new internet network because the existing telephone network simply can't deliver the requirments that the 21st century poses. On a positive note I have to take my hat off to those of you who are facilitating this in the research field. Cheers Don Don Stokes wrote:

Dean Pemberton wrote:

...

The Universities didn't build that first link to Hawaii so that hundreds of NZ'ers could all surf pr0n and play WOW at home. They did it because it was aligned to where their needs, research and strategic directions were. They didn't ask "How much money could this make" nor did they ask "How popular do you think this will be". In fact I can remember a certain network administrator actively discouraging more people from connecting to the Internet.

There were mixed views on where the Universities should be in terms of providing Internet services to the great unwashed. On the one hand, promoting and expanding the Internet outside the Universities' own needs was a way of getting a better Internet for themselves; on the other, doing so was a heck of a long way from what the Universities' IT departments were funded for.

In the mid 90s, the Universities were no longer the only game in town, and by the late 90s, they had largely shed their third party responsibilities. Only VUW's Internet services operation had enough momentum to keep going as a competitive commercial ISP, having subsumed Auckland University's service. Even VUW had spun off NetLink, and the University itself was simply NetLink's biggest customer.

Also, most of the Universities' IT operations went through some fairly brutal restructuring during that mid-90s timeframe. Relatively few of the people who made the Internet happen in the late 80s and early 90s are still there. At VUW, almost the entire systems and networks team (and a number of others) left as a result of the "restructuring" of ITS in '96-'97, leaving the new regime more or less starting from scratch.

Academic use of and research into the Internet has ticked along through all this. It's just that what the Universities were doing in terms of actually building the Internet in the late 80s and early 90s was a lot more visible than academics doing research and producing papers. Buying a bunch of data circuits from a telecommunications monopoly that just plain didn't get it, while an interesting exercise in economics, hardly qualified as research.

-- don

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