The following text is copyright 1993 by Network World, permission is hearby
given for reproduction, as long as attribution is given and this notice is
included.
By: Scott Bradner
A few years ago Harvard
University participated in a trial of a Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) with
the local regional telephone company. This was quite a nice package offering
Ethernet speed LAN connections to four Boston & Cambridge sites. Before the
trial started we had a few somewhat slower (2400 to 9600 baud) connections
between most of the sites but the increase to 10 MB/sec made quite a
difference. Before and during the trial the vendor sent up survey teams to
ascertain what applications we were running over the test network. We kept
telling them that while we were using dozens of network based applications
(with a potential for hundreds) there were few, if any, additional applications
enabled because of the higher speed pathways. Things simply took less time. The
survey teams just could not understand and kept pumping us to tell them the two
or three applications that could be used to justify a MAN service offering.
I'm telling this story
in light of congressional testimony a few weeks ago pushing for the
telecommunications vendors to provide the service that would be the foundation
of the national data network infrastructure. I'm not sure that the time for
that is here yet. The telecommunications industry is beginning to get the
picture of what is involved in providing a inter-organizational data network.
Unfortunately there are still some problems with their current understandings
of the scope of the problem.
For example, the most
common wide area data service offering from the telecommunications vendors is
Virtual Private Networks (VPN). VPNs are a way for many branches of an
organization to be connected but they are not pooled like the telephone system
where one phone gets you to any other phone. Buying network connections with
VPNs is like purchasing telephone service that allows you to talk to your
branch office in NYC but not to some other business next door. You don't build
an infrastructure by keeping the pile of parts separate. So far most of the
offerings do not include any form of interconnection to what is known as the
Internet. Sprint's SprintLink and Willtell's WillPower are two exceptions.
It is the mid-level
networks, AlterNet, BARnet, NEARnet, SUREnet, PSInet, etc. that are actually
providing the inter -organizational connectivity now and make up the bulk of
the U.S. portion of the Internet. Most of these mid-levels are not intended
just for woolly academicians and paid for by the feds. NEARnet (yes, I have a
bias since I was one of the founders) started without NSF funds and is totally
self supporting. Its membership is now made up of more than 66% commercial
organizations. Whatever true infrastructure that does exist in this country is
mostly due to these mid-levels which connect thousands of organizations
together.
It may seem a bit silly
that these networks purchase their communications links from a local telephone
company, stick modems on the end and then resell the links to their customers.
It might seem that one could eliminate the middle-man (the mid-level networks)
and that the telephone companies could sell the conectivity service directly.
Well, most of the problems that the mid-level networks are confronted with are
not those of broken phone lines but those things that fall under the umbrella
of "user services" and problem resolution. Helping the user configure
their own environment to make use of, and protect themselves from, the Internet
is not an easy task. The current telecommunications vendors have not yet
understood this is a required part of an infrastructure service offering. (The
current push for ISDN will not change the picture, it just eliminates the
modems; the user service requirement is still there.)
It is reasonable to
expect that the time will come when true interconnectivity and useful user
support will be actually offered by the telecommunications vendors. Until then,
it will be important that the creation of any national data infrastructure be
done using the existing mid-level networks and under strong guidance or even
with some service provision contracted for by the Federal Government. This will
remain the case until the telecommunications vendors stop looking for the
"killer application" and realize that it has been here all along --
it is called "connectivity".