It is now one year after The Transition, the move from a federally-funded backbone network for research and education (the NSFNET) to competitive commercial networks. Stories of unhappy users abound; rumors of escalating charges for network services fuel the predictions of gloom and doom. The people who benefited from the first 45 Mb open network during the early part of this decade now find themselves unable to reliably access computers across the country, much less use more demanding applications.
A decade ago Educom established a Networking and Telecommunications Task Force (NTTF) to foster the development of the National Information Infrastructure for research and education. At that time, colleges and universities were connected to each other and to important resources only haphazardly and these connections were considered a bonus, not a way of doing business. Commercial providers of Internet services did not exist and the Internet was not mentioned in the popular press at all.
Today there are inter-connected commercial network service providers, and NTTF's first mission has essentially been completed. The Internet has become a de facto standard for a national and global network that institutions and individuals can easily connect to via a choice of hardware and vendors.
Last September NTTF, along with nine other organizations, sponsored a workshop in Monterey, California, bringing together representatives from government, higher education and industry to assess progress on the goal of an information infrastructure, not just connectivity. Discussions followed three different tracks: Intellectual Property, Applications and Technology. A full report from this workshop is available from Educom (Higher Education and the NII: From Vision to Reality). Common to all discussions was the need for (and the lack of) a capable and reliable technological infrastructure. This theme has been the subject of subsequent meetings as well as informal conversations among dissatisfied users of research and education networks and those charged with providing networking to higher education.
Are the perceived problems real? Yes, there are real performance problems although more work must be done to isolate them and determine the causes. Why are there problems? What are the solutions?
First, popularity has its downside. The overwhelming growth in the demand for Internet services contributes to service deterioration when the services can not keep up with the demand. Higher education suffers particularly because the uses are frequently time-sensitive. Unlike e-mail, where delays are not significant, remote use of computers is successful only when circuits are not over-loaded.
Second, during the NSFNET backbone days, the National Science Foundation was able to work with its partners to push the technology from 1.5 Mb to 45 Mb before (but not much before) the demand outpaced the service. Even early in the project, steps were taken to improve reliability and performance by adding more circuits. While the shift to competitive services was occurring, there was no change in the underlying technology. The vendors have been relying on 45 Mb since it was first introduced in 1991. There has been no four-year speed-up, just the addition of more circuits to cope with the exponential growth.
Third, bottom-line thinking, rather than requirements for research and education, is governing the deployment of the networking infrastructure. Business volume is so high, that there is not sufficient competition to push prices down or services up.
What can higher education do to address this situation? In the near term, NTTF will convene a group to address user concerns with the major Internet service providers, providing a broad forum for identifying and solving operational problems.
For the longer term, higher education will need to collectively push for the appropriate networking services from the vendor community. In addition, institutions must plan how they will pay for these services. With the network, there are new opportunities for institutions to extend their services beyond residential learning and research. To take advantage of these possibilities, however, higher education must be prepared to allocate funds for targeting new markets. The National Science Foundation will continue to fund leading edge technology development, a very important task, but higher education must find a way to pay for on-going services.
Over the next months, the NTTF will be exploring avenues for meeting higher education's future networking requirements, so that research and education can realize the full benefits of this technology.
Jane Caviness is vice president of Educom. [email protected]