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From: schoff@uu.psi.com (Martin Schoffstall)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Re: A Choice, and Then a Choice
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Date: 18 Oct 90 05:42:09 GMT
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Reply-To: Martin Schoffstall <schoff@uu.psi.com>
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X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 10, Issue 743, Message 1 of 11


This is enormously galling to the people who have spent large amounts
of time building the US Internet over the last five to ten years, let
alone the US Public Data Networks.  Mostly what I see are the
Europeans emulating what happened in the US several years ago:
governent sponsored/controlled research&education T1 TCP/IP and "OSI",
while the US begins the moves into commercial internetworks.

Right now we have hundreds of Columbia students using terminal servers
in Boston, Hartford, WhitePlains, NYC, Newark, DC, LA using the PSINet
portion of the Internet.  Rutgers has an in depth NJ system for its
use, as does Merit for the state of Michigan, all of them are free to
the students and in truth pretty low cost to the sites that amortize
the internetworking bill.

While I think Yellow Pages is nice for industry/business/home
(partially why it was done in France) I don't think students are a
good represenative audience, I needed to know where a couple of pizza
places were because that is all I could afford.  Even today as a
business person, I'll use the White Pages 500 times more than I do the
Yellow Pages.  Hence the Internet interest in White Pages using X.500,
something working today.

What they had was a monopolistic situation that got a lot of terminals
into a lot of places, and the continuation of a now ancient technology
that in no way compares against an Xterminal which I can drive from
home with a V.32/V.42bis modem, or better yet on my LAN connected to
the Internet.  I'm sure if we had let Bell stay in control or allowed
the RBOC's to mandate the future, I'd be using a 600 baud V.52
terminal equivalent right now.

Honestly, if this is the best example that they are going to cite,
then there is no good reasons to even let them do more than POTS.


Marty