There will be considerable economies of scale in serving education and libraries through a larger NII whose economic justification comes from other commercial users. It would be prohibitively expensive to provide high-speed data communication service to a large number of widely dispersed homes and campuses for research and education purposes unless there could be some economy through sharing with other users of a nationwide data communications infrastructure.”
Predictor: National Research Council
Prediction, in context:In 1994, the NRENaissance Committee, appointed by the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council, produced a special report titled “Realizing the Information Future: The Internet and Beyond.” Among the committee members were Internet pioneers Leonard Kleinrock, David Clark, David Farber, Lawrence Landweber and Robert Kahn. The committee’s goal was to “study issues raised by the shift to a larger, more truly national networking capability.” Among its statements about the blossoming of the National Information Infrastructure (NII) is this: ”The scale of the NII challenge is a principal reason that the federal government has chosen not to contract for a separate network but to transfer the burden of network construction and operation to commercial interests. The research and education communities illustrate the scalability problem even though they are only a part of it: these communities are widely distributed across the United States; they occupy 110,000 K-12 school buildings and over 3,000 higher-education campuses; and the research and educational infrastructure for those who have already left school involves some 15,500 public libraries. These facilities house approximately 47 million school children, 15 million higher-education students, and 3 million teachers and faculty. Moreover, most of these same individuals also work at home – children and older students do homework, and faculty grade work and prepare for the next day of teaching. Serving a widely dispersed community reduces the opportunities for sharing. If only a few sites in a community are connected to a network (e.g., only the schools and libraries), it will be necessary to allocate to these few users not only the cost of the local access link from each site, but also the cost of the link from the community to a m ore distant network access site. This argues that there will be considerable economies of scale in serving education and libraries through a larger NII whose economic justification comes from other commercial users. It would be prohibitively expensive to provide high-speed data communication service to a large number of widely dispersed homes and campuses for research and education purposes unless there could be some economy through sharing with other users of a nationwide data communications infrastructure.”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: Information Infrastructure
Subtopic: Cost/Pricing
Name of publication: Realizing the Information Future: The Internet and Beyond
Title, headline, chapter name: Cost of Network Infrastructure
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://stills.nap.edu/html/rtif/
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney