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Kent Fitch (fit106@its.csiro.au) wrote:
: I was told the other day that the growth in the "commercial" use of Internet
: in the USA is outstripping the growth of traditional users such as education/
: research organizations.  Is this true?  If so, how is it being managed, and 
: are similar things happening in Australia?

I  suppose  the  most  appropriate  response  is that if Internet provides a
viable solution to the communications needs of  the  academic  and  research
sector  then  it  is  highly  probable  that other sectors can also see cost
effective solutions to their communications needs - after all a system on  a
desk is a system on a desk  -  no matter where the desk is. 

Look at it another way - what else is around - OSI???


: What is the view of the Internet/AARNet custodians to this trend - encouragement
: or fear & loathing?  Will traffic charges be introduced based on "type" of
: user?

It  all  depends on how large your vision is - I can certainly indicate that
the Internet Society view is that of ubiquitous infrastructure ... the  work
in IPv7 takes as a starting parameter an Internet of 100 million systems and 
requires  growth  above  and  beyond  that  -  thats as good a definition of 
comprehensive infrastructure as you'll ever get. 

: What about general and direct public access (to any home with a UNIX or NT box)?
: Are Telecom/Optus involved here - what about other carriers overseas?
: What is happening in other areas such as Europe, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan?

All  these  questions  - there are detailed answers to them but I don't have
the time to answer at length. However there is a fundamental aspect  of  any
general  purpose  communcations system: unless it gets _everywhere_ it isn't
achieving its maximal power. And there's little doubt that there are  strong
pressures  at  work  all  over  the  Internet  to  push  the  boundaries  of
connectivity further and further towards ubiquity. 

Subscribe  to the com-priv mail list if you want to get closer to the issues
associated with expansion of the Internet into wider domains. 

Geoff Huston

fit106@its.csiro.au (Kent Fitch) writes:

>I was told the other day that the growth in the "commercial" use of Internet
>in the USA is outstripping the growth of traditional users such as education/
>research organizations.  Is this true?  If so, how is it being managed, and 
>are similar things happening in Australia?

It is quite reasonable to expect that business growth in use of the
Internet is exceeding that in the education sector given that Universities
and generally only research departments started out on ARPANet.  As for
which is growing the quickest, a good gauge of this growth would be to
take a look at the growth in size of root domains (the last one had some
root domains record 200% growth over the period (3 months  I think),
Australia (.au) grew 94%).  For commercial users, America has providers
besides the government backed NSFNet, namely CIX and AlterNet.  ANS is
also part of this group and they (with a lot of monetry help from IBM)
provide the NSF backbone but with a tighter AUP.  I know of no alternative
to AARNet in terms of a country wide provider doing IP networking in
Australia.  Blah, I hope I got all that right, but as Geoff suggested,
if you're interested in the efforts behind comercialization of the Internet
and the problems/debates/flame wars associated with that, join com-priv.

Currently, I imagine that management is pretty much still centred around
"the NIC", from domain name allocation to network numbers.  Whether any
of the allocation of network numbers can be (or is) given to the
providers if CIDR comes in soon is yet to be seen.  Certainly with IPv7
network numbers will come from your provider rather than "the NIC".
How things work with registering under a domain not directly controlled
by "the NIC" (such as .au which kre looks after) I'm not sure of.

Re com-priv, if there are enough people on this locally to Australia,
would someone consider setting up an exloder for it ?  It is a list with
a fairly high volume.

Darren

say NO! to politicians and their ridiculous policies and vote INFORMAL!

Kent Fitch (fit106@its.csiro.au) wrote:
: I was told the other day that the growth in the "commercial" use of Internet
: in the USA is outstripping the growth of traditional users such as education/
: research organizations.  Is this true?  

Yes, it very likely that there are now significantly more "commercial" nodes
reachable (directly or indirectly) than "academic" nodes (the current counts
show that it's roughly 50-50, however this doesn't take in to account that
most machines on corporate networks do not show up in the DNS).

: What is the view of the Internet/AARNet custodians to this trend - encouragement
: or fear & loathing?  Will traffic charges be introduced based on "type" of
: user?

The only people that have problems with this (fear & loathing) are people
that are feeding off tax payers money and are seeing their arguments
for subsidies vanishing (this is a remark that explicitly does not apply
to Australia, which currently is a special case).

: What is happening in other areas such as Europe, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan?

I don't very know much about the later three, but in Europe the situation
is practically the same as in the States (expect that even more politics
are involved).

Naturally we (EUnet) are very interested in what's going on in Australia
and we would hope that we see commercial service providers emerge that
will be viable as partners for us. (Besides the business aspect, it would
be an good excuse to visit my home country the first time since 33 years
:-)).

-- 
CHUUG/EUnet Switzerland				Simon Poole
Zweierstrasse 35	Tel: +41 1 291 45 80	poole@eunet.ch
CH-8004 Zuerich		Fax: +41 1 291 46 42	S=poole;P=EUnet;A=EUnet;C=CH

poole@chsun.chuug.ch (Simon Poole) writes:
>Naturally we (EUnet) are very interested in what's going on in Australia
>and we would hope that we see commercial service providers emerge that
>will be viable as partners for us. (Besides the business aspect, it would
>be an good excuse to visit my home country the first time since 33 years
>:-)).

Simon, its not as simple as it should be. AARN "owners" have resisted all
attempts to date that redefined the mandate to include non-research oriented
people as 'peers' 

The motivation is pretty straightforward: They own the network and don't
want to loose control. Commercialization neccessarily dilutes their control
of the resource. There are aspects to migrating a centrally funded 
academic/research network into the wider community which pose 'political'
questions hot-blooded lefties like me find difficult to handle, quite outside
of the issues like user-pays.

Unless/Until AARN opens the doors a bit wider, I think full bore commercial
IP with connectivity back to the USA is a way off. The head of steam needed
to fund the basic links is being used up on the existing network.

-George
--
                         George Michaelson
G.Michaelson@cc.uq.oz.au The Prentice Centre      | There's no  market for
                         University of Queensland | hippos in Philadelphia
Phone: +61 7 365 4079    QLD Australia 4072       |          -Bertold Brecht