🚀 go-pugleaf

I had the luxury today of attending the NTIA Open
Access Hearing at the City of Sunnyvale Community Center.
If I must say, "Wonderful Wonderful Wonderful."
Good source of information and real faces to identify with
defining the players (but please don't quiz me).
If you know of other open/free meetings relating to the NII
please post them.  Thank you in advance.

Unfortunately, the hearing was mostly stakeholders.
I don't think any teachers, social workers, real estate
planners or what you might call the real public attended.
It was interesting from the prospective that the hearing
board came to Silicon Valley because of the technology
base and the installed user base, hoping to get a much
stronger view of how to deal with some of the social and
economic issues.  Instead many of the players were looking
for answers from the hearing board or had info-mercials.
Somehow the real public needs to get involved.

One may suggest that the hearing board included a technical
consultant to advise on some of the technology issues and to
ask some of the tougher questions. I question arose relating to
legislation and switching.  It concerned bandwidth capabilities,
bandwidth costs and on which side of the demarc should switching
occur.  Another issue was presented related to the future of the
technology and the cost of CPU processing.  The hearing panel
members (PUC, FCC, DOC) were asking the stakeholders for their
opinions.  Kind of like asking Heinz if catsup should be a
vegetable for school lunches.  There are so many fine details
when dealing with the technology that it is easy to create
another situation comparable to the cable pricing regulation
issues of the past.

All in all it was enlightening, contrary to the model the
hearing panel seemed to be interested in social good,
while most (not you of course) of the audience was there
for commerce.

Just another opinion in cyberspace.

-- 
        Gary K. Nitzberg                    gknitz@netcom.com