Re: What is your project experience?
Peter Berger (peterb@psc.edu)
Thu, 27 Mar 1997 09:06:52 -0500
Hi. My name's Pete Berger, and I'm the coordinator of the
CK:P tech staff. I'll be your bandwidth pessimist this
evening.
First, let me say that I think Dr. Carlitz gave a good
summary of our experiences with various technologies
here at CK:P. I'd like to take the ball and run with
it a bit.
Dr. Carlitz observes that our trials with HDSL and cable
modems were pretty much failures (we had some stunning
successes early on with HDSL, but attempts to follow them
up have proved difficult). I would generalize these
experiences into the following statement:
"You can't effectively use a technology that a vendor
doesn't want to sell."
In some cases, whether or not the vendor wants to sell a
technology depends on timing: it looks like xDSL may become
viable (read: the bells will want to sell it) sometime in
then next 3 years. But that doesn't help those schools that
are trying to purchase it today who are getting inadequate
support.
I think that any viable, scalable plan for networking must
have the complete mindshare of the chosen local loop provider,
and a reliable service as its underpinning.
Without this, you may as well be playing roulette. This does,
of course, mean that more expensive alternatives may be
more "viable" by my definition. I'm not sure how to work
through that problem.
> 3) How are school districts dealing with implications of the
> Telecommunications Act of 1996? That Act provides for Universal
> Service subsidies, currently pegged at over 2 billion dollars
> a year. These subsidies should kick in next fall on a first come,
> first served basis. Who is ready for this? It's worth noting
> that these subsidies are larger in total dollars than ANY
> existing federal education program. This isn't a minor perturbation
> on the system; it's a mechanism for building things from the
> ground up, but only if school districts know what to do with it.
> Do they?
I'm skeptical of this based on my experiences in rural Legal
Aid. As of 1994, only about 60% of our clients in Greene and
Fayette counties had simple basic telephone service. This makes
sense: the costs of providing service to rural areas is generally
several orders of magnitude above that of service urban area.
Generally, the telcos will seek special permission from the PUCs
to exempt rural areas from their obligation to provide service
(for example, Bell Atlantic did this when they began to deploy
ISDN).
So my objections are:
1) If Universal Service didn't work for basic telephone service, why
would it work for data networking, and. if you'll pardon the metaphor,
2) What are the political implications of purchasing cake for
urban residents when rural residents are starving for bread?
Implicit in my second question is the assumption that a voice
telephone line is a more essential service than computer
networking.
--
Pete Berger, Esq.
Technical Coordinator, Common Knowledge: Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center
peterb@psc.edu http://www.psc.edu/~peterb