My guess is that sooner or later in Europe there will be general service provision of backbones, just as we have now in the U.S. What I am saying is that in the not-to-distant future – and I don’t know if we are talking one, three or five years. but certainly within that time frame – a lot of the so-called R&E community in Europe will be served by general-purpose providers, just as the R&E community will now be in the U.S. In this kind of situation, it doesn’t make any sense for the U.S. government to stay in there and maintain its own intercontinental links.
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: ”As we look at the future, the problem is that the community we are serving is no longer going to be served by a well-defined NSFnet backbone. Instead, service will be spread out over several general-purpose backbones. Thus, the question becomes how we identify AUP (Acceptable Use Policy) traffic from this community to estimate in any rational way the cost of international service? We don’t have packet counters that can distinguish between AUP acceptable packets. When traffic entered the ICM pipes from the NSFnet backbone, we could say that it was AUP clean. With no NSF backbone and traffice being aggregated at AUP-free NAPs to be shipped overseas, we can no longer distinguish between R&E traffic and that of Chase Manhattan Bank or other commercial users … My guess is that sooner or later in Europe there will be general service provision of backbones, just as we have now in the U.S. What I am saying is that in the not-to-distant future – and I don’t know if we are talking one, three or five years. but certainly within that time frame – a lot of the so-called R&E community in Europe will be served by general-purpose providers, just as the R&E community will now be in the U.S. In this kind of situation, it doesn’t make any sense for the U.S. government to stay in there and maintain its own intercontinental links, and, with the exception of Scandinavia, England and France, we really aren’t doing that anyway. We are doing some cooperative funding with Mexico on their link, but they are paying by far the lion’s share. We have a little bit of assistance to South Africa, largely due to the fact that they are relaying mail from neighboring countries.”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: Information Infrastructure
Subtopic: Pipeline/Switching/Hardware
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