On Sunday, February 24, 2002, at 11:25 , Matthew Poole wrote:
On Sun, 24 Feb 2002, Joe Abley wrote:
On Sunday, February 24, 2002, at 10:37 , Stephen Donnelly wrote:
How much bandwidth is "a lot of bandwidth"? I see commercial providers with multiple parallel STM-64s plumbed directly into routers either sides of the Atlantic and the Pacific, who are struggling to attract customers to even remotely fill the pipes. The situation in the metro and long-haul intracontinental networks is even more fibre-rich. I don't see a need to build another internet here -- I see a need to start using the existing one :)
Now, could it possibly be the horrendous charges that said providers are attempting to make people pay? ROI is all well and good, but there's a point at which you are charging more than people are prepared to pay, even insanely rich people, and thusly the network remains unused and there's no money coming in to provide a return on the investment.
The answer I'm starting to hear is that there are no technical advantages to Internet2 over the existing mesh of commercial providers; the advantages are that the bandwidth is free. This is confusing; sooner or later someone pays for the bandwidth. Lighting up glass under the Pacific is never going to be free. Digging up the road will never be free. If the end-users aren't paying for the bandwidth directly, then taxpayers are presumably funding it. If it's really accepted that, technically, a separate network is unnecessary, it seems like it would be a much better use of taxpayers' money to fund connections to the existing commercial networks rather than incurring the costs of building and operating a new network. So, again, why internet2? Joe - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog