From: Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>
Date: Mon, 20 May 1996 15:39:23 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Too cheap to meter
Message-ID: <199605200239.TAA12059@toad.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


>At 07:09 PM 5/15/96 EDT, E. ALLEN SMITH wrote:
>>	One problem with the development of such high-end technologies is that
>>they tend to increase economies of scale to the point where it's
impractical to
>>have anything but a monopoly or ogliopoly. As well as concerns about the
degree
>>of control such an organization may be able to exert in and of itself (acting
>>like a government, in essence), there's also that such an organization is
>>easier to pressure than a lot of small providers.  Anyone have a suggested
>>solution, or reasons that I shouldn't be so worried?

The nice thing about economies of scale is that they make it possible
to do things that used to be too expensive with older technology.
For instance, the Internet has problems now because the Network Access Point
capacities are really too low to let everyone connect to them,
so there are limited numbers of powerful ISPs feeding the rest of us:
the DEC Gigaswitches handle 16 users, and the FDDI-based systems
don't have the capacity to support more than a couple T3-capable ISPs.
Faster technology may let more people on.

Faster technology also changes the balance between communications and
computing - it's really hard to _do_ anything with 1Tb/s other than
shove packets around between multiplexers.  On the other hand,
if the NSA (or NASA or Yoyodyne or some other surrogate) is on a
FDDI NAP, they can promiscuously receive all the packets that go by
and sniff for interesting addresses.

Jim Bell:
>You might as well forget about this 1 Tb/s fiber, for example.  In order to 
>justify such a thing, you need to have 1 Tb/s of information that you want 
>to take from "here" to "there".  A city of 1 million people would have to 

It's true that that's about 10 million simultaneous voice calls,
which is enough for about 60 million typical business phones if they
all went through the fiber, which they wouldn't, since they're mostly local.
It's alternatively enough for 10,000 uncompressed TV-quality video streams,
if you like variety in your television networks.  Or 20,000 T3s.

One major effect that happens if bandwidth becomes cheap (and I'm not sure
that the mux costs for a system that size would really let it be cheap)
is that it becomes cost-effective for far more people to get into the
phone basis, bypassing the current local phone companies.  The last mile
to your house may still be expensive (that's also changing), but the
last mile to any large office building or apartment complex isn't, for voice.

> ....eggs in one basket...
For redundancy, you'd probably use 4 fibers in a FDDI-like ring.
Most of the major long-distance carriers are deploying their SONET
as fully redundant rings, though one or two of them may still be
considering non-fully-redundant SONET configurations, and even the
carriers who are doing the Right Thing may do the Cheap Thing transitionally.



#					Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, stewarts@ix.netcom.com, +1-415-442-2215
# goodtimes signature virus innoculation