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.
Predictor: Karraker, Roger
Prediction, in context:In a 1991 article for The Whole Earth Review, a quarterly magazine of access to tools and ideas, Roger Karraker writes about the network: ”[Network] traffic more than doubled between September 1989 and September 1990. It is projected to double again this year. 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. The universities and research centers would pay the additional costs for the local-area networks that would connect their scholars to the network. When completed in 1995 the network would have a 3-gigabit backbone – 3 billion bits per second, a 66-fold increase over the current T-3 capacity, a 50,000-fold increase over the old ARPA lines. That’s about 300 million times faster than the clattering state-of-the-art teletypes I used at the Associated Press a quarter-century ago. What can you do with 3 billion bits per second? The NREN Coalition likens it to sending 100 three-dimensional x-rays and CAT scans every second for 100 cancer patients, or sending 1,000 satellite photographs to researchers investigating agricultural productivity, environmental pollution or weather prediction. Reduced to just words, it would be 100,000 typed pages per second, or as the Coalition dangles tantalizingly before us, ‘making it possible to transmit the entire Encyclopaedia Brittanica in a second.’ Now before you begin salivating at the thought of every book, every magazine article available instantaneously at your slightest whim, 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 in the NREN proposal.”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1991
Topic of prediction: Information Infrastructure
Subtopic: Universal Service
Name of publication: Whole Earth Revue
Title, headline, chapter name: Highways of the Mind or Toll Roads Between Information Castles?
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.eff.org/Net_culture/Criticisms/hiways_of_mind.article
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Stotler, Larry