If we believe so mightily that our national future is very much wrapped up in computing and telecommunications – and that especially research and education are going to have to be improved mightily for us to compete – then we ought to be thinking a lot more carefully than we are now about which portion of telecommunications should be government-provided/subsidized/regulated and which portion pure profit-and-loss commercial.
Whatever infrastructure we create should incorporate a notion of “universal digital service,” much as AT&T pioneered, and which later became national policy, with respect to voice telephony in the early 20th century. Everyone should be able to connect to the Net.
Because we are broadening the community of those using the network, the fixed costs of national networking will be more widely distributed. This will free up funds which could then be allocated to assist the neediest organizations to connect to the national network, as well as to continue to support and enable the national network to remain in the vanguard of new technology.
Every morning millions of commuters across America sit in cars inching their way toward cluttered, polluted and crime-ridden cities. Or they sit in dilapidated trains rattling toward office towers that survive as business centers chiefly because of their superior access to the global network of computers and telecommunications. With telecomputers in every home attached to global fiber network, why would anyone commute?
The telecomputer could revitalize public education by bringing the best teachers in the country to classrooms everywhere. More important, the telecomputer could encourage competition because it could make home schooling both feasible and attractive. To learn social skills, neighborhood children could gather in micro-schools run by parents, churches or other local institutions. The competition of home schooling would either destroy the public school system or force it to become competitive with rival systems.
The metaphor of the need for “Highways of the Mind” across this land is very deceptive. It really could turn out to mean “Super Toll Roads between Castles.” That is not my vision of a Network Nation.
NREN’s plan, with local schools not even mentioned, could perpetuate educational elitism, where the already-prosperous research universities get additional taxpayer-paid subsidized service and the already-poor local schools get short shrift.
One doesn’t need the vast capacity of NREN to exchange simple electronic mail. There are many alternative, if slower, networks available. Using super-sophisticated NREN for such mundane tasks might be like trying to get a drink out of a fire hose. And it’s problematic whether local schools and libraries would be able to pay for the equipment needed to exchange items much more complex than simple electronic mail. There’s the potential here for the creation of information haves and information have-nots.
It won’t take too long to exhaust even those T-3 lines that carry 800+ times the data of the pre-1987 lines. That’s where the NREN proposal comes in. As proposed by the Coalition for the National Research and Education Network and championed by Senator Gore, Congress would authorize the network and provide $400 million over five years to put it in place … Here’s the rub: as currently designed, NREN’s 3-gigabit data lines aren’t coming to your house, or your kids’ school, even your local library. NREN will connect only the largest research universities and consortia, at least one in every state. From there, lower-speed regional networks would connect nearby institutions. At the bottom of NREN’s proposed three-tier system would be local campus networks. There’s no plan or provision for K-12 schools or local libraries.
At a time when federal budget deficits approach $300 billion per year the idea of letting private enterprise foot the whole bill is powerfully attractive. And that is essentially what IBM, MCI and Merit, an agency of the state of Michigan have proposed.