🚀 go-pugleaf

Peter Elford (pte900@jatz.aarnet.edu.au) wrote:

: What can be done ? Upgrade the US link. To do this requires money and the
: agreement of those that control the network - the Vice Chancellors. 

I would guess that the US-Australia link will be continually underfunded
so long as there is but one network connection into Australia.

What I have seen of educational / academic network policies toward
international link bandwidth (and also to some extent the import and
export of Usenet news) is that a competetive source of networking
to the region stimulates investment and liberalizes traffic restrictions.
To cite some particular examples -
- in Canada, the US-Canada academic link from ONET (Ontario) to NSFNET
  was deathly slow with no immediate prospects for improvement; but,
  not long after UUNET Canada opened a parallel link from Toronto to
  Washington somehow funds materialized for an upgrade.
- in Germany, the import of Usenet news and the export of news from
  non-DNET sites was severely taxed until parallel and unrestricted
  news feeds were found and imported into the country over independently
  operated links
- in the UK, the appearance of a non-UKnet commercial provider (Pipex)
  stimulated not just a liberalization of network traffic flows into
  Britain but also a flurry of software development of people working
  on codes for dialup IP lines previously unavailable at UKnet tarriffs.

The most important goal that I can see for the Internet community in
Australia is the development of competetive sources of supply for
transPacific networking bandwidth.  From the net.perspective in Michigan
(admittedly rather far away :) you are seriously handicapped by 
neither having obvious alternatives to begging the Vice Chancellors
for more bandwidth nor any sensible way to offer public access Internet
to the (paying) general public.  You are never likely to find enough
support strictly from the academic community to expand the net wide
enough in Australia to meet the demands of all of those people who
learned it in school and want to carry it on to their first job.

  Edward Vielmetti, vice president for research, Msen Inc. emv@Msen.com
        Msen Inc., 628 Brooks, Ann Arbor MI  48103 +1 313 998 GLOB