On Sat, 10 Jun 2006, Dean Pemberton wrote:
Nice flame bait.
Rather than biting by purely pulling out the 'ignorant' card, I'll let InternetNZ do it instead. =)
Dean, You missed where I said: "The Universities did nothing in the Internet area for 10 years except ..." I fully acknowledge the huge contribution made by the Universities in getting the Internet started in New Zealand etc. However following the establishment of the commercial Internet providers from the mid 1990s (and most of those InternetNZ Fellows moving to the commercial sector) the Universities have had little real involvement in the New Zealand Internet for a good 10 years. Issues of Policy and Society have been taken over by InternetNZ [1] and the infrastructure has degraded to a point where a couple of years ago there was a speaker at NZNOG from Waikato University who was paying $2/Megabyte for traffic for his videoconferencing [2] work. Read Andy's post that I was following up to about how a push from VUW, Massey and Waikato got the others into building a National network and how perhaps "we need a similar event to give the REANNZ folk a kick up the backside!". He obviously feels something is lacking there. My argument is that the Internet was off the Universities' radar for 10 years and the fact that REANNZ is getting built now rather than 10 years ago indicates more a wish to fill the "Connected to high speed academic Network" tick box on the prospectus rather than any real interest. I thus don't think that Andy is going to see NZ Universities stretch in this area.
It's my opinion that the other players you're talking about (The Telecoms, The TelstraClears, and probably the IHUGS) did nothing more than provide what had already been developed on a larger scale for less money.
So why was that that network abandoned and now a new one has to be built? Please note that I am not saying that plenty of research and work isn't done at Universities on things that are 5 or 15 years away. However I believe that NZ Universities have chosen to specialize in other areas (bio science mostly) and thus are punching below their weight in the Internet, IT and related fields. Which is a shame because before the mid-90s they *were* relatively advanced. On the other hand bio science *is* important and perhaps it is a better use of resources. [1] - Look at it this way, when the government talks about a change to social welfare spending you hear a string of academics providing opinion and background on it. How many have you heard talking about local loop unbundling and similar topics this year? [2] - Rough description of what he was doing. -- Simon J. Lyall | Very Busy | Web: http://www.darkmere.gen.nz/ "To stay awake all night adds a day to your life" - Stilgar | eMT.