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From: arc...@arctos.com (The Arctos Group)
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Subject: ABOI: Internet Heads for Private Sector
Date: Wed, 2 Nov 1994 10:47:08 EST
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[Original article appeared in WWW online edition of ]
[the San Francisco Examiner. ] 
[URL: http://sfgate.com/examiner/ ]


Mon, Oct 31, 1994 

INTERNET HEADS FOR PRIVATE SECTOR
---------------------------------
Getting away from government subsidy is first step
toward commercialization

By Tom Abate EXAMINER TECHNOLOGY WRITER 

The Internet will quietly pass its first milestone on the road to 
commercialization Monday, when Pacific Bell and three other network access 
providers are supposed to demonstrate that they can carry electronic
traffic now on the government-subsidized National Science Foundation
network. 

The NSF net has long been the main thoroughfare of the Internet, that
global web of wires and switches that connects millions of computers and
carries billions of packets of information each month.

Over the next five years, the federal government plans to phase out its 
roughly $12 million-a-year subsidy of the NSF net and turn the job of 
running the Internet's main drag over to four network access providers,
or NAPs. 

That switch is scheduled to be complete by April 15, and with that deadline 
in mind, the NAPs were supposed to have demonstrated by Monday that they 
can start handling traffic that now travels on the NSF net. 

Pac Bell engineer Frank Liu, who runs the San Francisco NAP, said his 
company had hooked up its first Internet customers a couple of weeks ago, 
comfortably ahead of Monday's performance milestone. 

"Our job is making sure all the connections are good," Liu said. "For the 
individual user everything should be transparent." 

The other three NAPs are in Chicago, where Ameritech will handle traffic 
switching, the New York metropolitan area, where Sprint will provide the 
service, and Washington, D.C., where Metropolitan Fiber Systems will do 
the job. 

Those three NAPs are in varying stages of readiness, according to Stephen 
Wolff, director of the National Science Foundation's networking division. 

"For a long time it was looking pretty discouraging," Wolff said, as the 
NAPs encountered many problems with traffic routing. 

"My mood has switched to cautious optimism" of meeting the April 15 goal of 
having the NAPs replace the NSF net as the Internet's backbone, Wolff said. 

Beyond the technical problems of rerouting billions of information packets 
from NSF net to the NAPs, Internet users worry that the gradual end of 
federal involvement will lead to some people's being cut off from or priced 
out of the Internet. 

But supporters of privatization say that as the NAPS turn the Internet into 
more of a commercial thoroughfare, they will bring more traffic and lower 
prices for all. 

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