Steve Goldstein Describes History of First ICM Grant – Speculates On New Directions | Imagining the Internet

The prediction, in brief:

There is every indication that we will keep hitting congestion and have to add more bandwidth … A very interesting indication of what could be a trend is Malaysia that started with 64 kilobits and plans now to upgrade a step to T-1. I think we’ll see more of this. South Africa is now at 128, and they are looking at the possibility of doing at least 256 and, as soon as they can afford it, T-1 or E-1. There seems to be no end in sight. There is, however, a finite budget that we have to spend on this.

Predictor: Goldstein, Steve

Prediction, in context:

In a 1995 question-answer interview published on the Cook Report on Internet Web site, Steve Goldstein, a researcher/administrator for the National Science Foundation, Goldstein says:”We are now in year four of a five-year cooperative agreement with Sprint. We have two E-1s to Stockholm, two E-1s to London, plus a T-1 to London; the T-1 is now shared by ARPA and NASA. We have an E-1 and one megabit of a T-1 to Paris. There is every indication that we will keep hitting congestion and have to add more bandwidth. In addition, there are a number of countries that are connecting to this infrastructure that Sprint built with ICM and under its own SprintLink initiative. In many cases, we are paying at our discretion a port management fee on behalf of those countries which are paying the total cost of their actual links to the U.S. A lot of these circuits are 64 kilobits, but a lot are also congested. A very interesting indication of what could be a trend is Malaysia that started with 64 kilobits and plans now to upgrade a step to T-1. I think we’ll see more of this. South Africa is now at 128, and they are looking at the possibility of doing at least 256 and, as soon as they can afford it, T-1 or E-1. There seems to be no end in sight. There is, however, a finite budget that we have to spend on this.”

Date of prediction: January 1, 1995

Topic of prediction: Information Infrastructure

Subtopic: Bandwidth

Name of publication: The Cook Report on Internet

Title, headline, chapter name: Steve Goldstein Describes History of First ICM Grant – Speculates On New Directions

Quote Type: Direct quote

Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.cookreport.com/icm.shtml

This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney