From: cmf851@huxley.anu.edu.au (Albert Langer)
Newsgroups: aus.aarnet,comp.org.eff.talk
Subject: Ripping off AARNET research funds. (Was Re: FASTPAC and AARNET)
Followup-To: aus.aarnet,comp.org.eff.talk
Date: 12 Oct 1992 17:03:03 GMT
Organization: Australian National University
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: 150.203.2.12

In article <1992Oct2.122322.160@degsyd.syd.deg.csiro.au> 
ip_boss@degsyd.syd.deg.csiro.au (Jack Churchill) writes:

[Jack]
>>>Is it about here we should start planning for B-ISDN/ATM to provide reliable
>>>mult-media services.  Definitive standards for B-ISDN/ATM are yet to be set
>>>but by the sounds of people I've talked to in the commercial networking 
>>>world, ATM style networking has a very promising future which will
>>>effectively merge WAN and LAN.  Is Optus looking at it and should we be 
>>>encouraging it?

[Albert]
>> Who is "we"? If you mean AARNET circles, what on earth would they encourage
>> it WITH? 

>We = Australia.  Else we remain the stupid country.  

I know that opinion is widespread. But surely when discussing global
developments in telecommunications in a Usenet newsgroup, a slightly
broader perspective could be expected. "We" does NOT equal "Australia".

I am adding comp.org.eff.talk to the newsgroups list in the hope of
a broader perspective.

If Australia actually DID something "clever" like establishing the first
"networked nation" only a couple of decades after the concept was widely
publicized, perhaps it could be known as a "clever country". Speeches
from politicians about "the clever country" won't make it so.
 
>When I said
>encourage I meant to inspire with hope, keeping in mind AARNet doesn't
>have any real money for such a large venture as installing modern
>high speed networks.  AARNet could just sit back and let someone else
>do all the work and when it's all in place winge about how it should
>have been done in the first place.  Isn't AARNet big enough and smart
>enough to have some influence on where Australia should be heading with
>networking?

Instead of trying to teach grandma Telecom how to suck eggs, it would be better
to pay more attention to what amazingly sharp CLAWS she has.

AARNET has a staff of two, which is smaller than an average suburban
milkbar. They must be pretty smart to have been able to do so much with
so little, but no, I don't think AARNET is either big enough or smart
enough to have any influence on where Australia should be heading
with networking (let alone any influence on such questions as B-ISDN
and ATM, which are global, not Australian issues). 

If you mean AARNET users, they have not so far proved that they
are even smart enough to prevent a research grant specifically allocated
to upgrading AARNET from being grabbed by Telecom and IBM Australia and 
spent "primarily" on Telecom's internal requirements for B-ISDN research. 
I still hope they will, but that will merely prove they are not complete 
zombies. There is a long way from being able to protect your own turf 
and not just getting pushed aside when the Government actually GIVES you 
money, to the point where you can "have some influence on where Australia 
should be heading" with any damn thing at all.

If you mean the Universities that own AARNET directly or
indirectly, they aren't even smart enough to establish a voice-data
network that would probably save them far more than the total cost
of AARNET just from reduced costs of STD calls between Universities.
As a matter of fact they are even still using 48Kbps DDS lines for
access to AARNET when ISDN MICROlinks are both cheaper and of greater
capacity. (Not to mention simply using banks of dialup modems which 
would be virtually free within any large metropolitan area).

Are entire University campuses that only have 48Kbps access who sit by quietly 
while funds allocated to upgrading AARNET are spent on videoconferencing to 
be taken seriously?

The Universities are certainly "big" enough to have more say on their
OWN networking requirements than a typical Telecom retail customer,
but they are managed by people who think it is "smart" to run AARNET on a 
shoestring (and try to con ASTEC into paying for routine University
infrastructure costs out of research budgets instead of allocating
a reasonable network budget from the same block grant funds that pay for
other running costs like telephones). If they WERE even just moderately
stupid rather than spectacularly brain damaged, they would at least
let AARNET go to a bank for working capital and operate commercial
services that could provide everything the Universities need at
lower cost by also servicing the wider demand for commercial Internet
connectivity. (Of course banks only lend money to people who don't need 
it - but AARNET is just the sort of borrower that banks LOVE to lend
money to - one who can PROVE that it has sufficient resources to pay
back with interest, because it is spending those resources doing things
the expensive way and simply needs an investment to allow it do things
a cheaper way.)

[Albert]
>> Surely the point of ATM is not just to merge WAN and LAN, but to
>> merge them both with PABX and local telephone exchange and the available
>> digital circuit switched network structure.

[Jack]
>Not necessarily but that can be done if AARnet wanted to.  

What on earth does the desires of an organization smaller than a suburban
milk bar have to do with whether the point of ATM is to integrate WAN
and LAN or to integrate both into ISDN via PABXs? AARNET uses ONE, count
them all, ONE 2 Mbps "megalink" on the main trunk route 
Melbourne-Canberra-Sydney.  That is what national organizations much smaller 
than the Universities use to link their PABXs. Upgrading LANs from "party
line" CD/CSMA to ATM switches or PABXs is certainly a step forward and will
facilitate WAN interworking, but AARNET and the Universities are hardly
likely to find themselves out in front leading the way.

>I'm just
>suggesting AARNet use the most appropriate technology for it's future
>needs which I see are mainly for linking computers of all types (ranging
>from low end desktops to supercomputers) all over the country for
>research activities of all kinds including high speed graphics
>applications as well as pushing through large volumes of data (computer,
>video, etc).  

The most appropriate technology for AARNET is whatever it can buy from
Telecom or Optus at optimum rates. AARNET is a CUSTOMER, not a
teleco. 

Since there are different requirements for bandwidth among
AARNET users there also needs to be mechanisms for charge-back so that
research which requires expensive resources does not crowd out the
"normal" use of the network by the large majority of users and is funded
from those specific research budgets rather than from the basic infrastructure
needed to simply allow general communication. Telephone extensions and
LAN/WAN connections are basic office requirements in any office, including
an academic's office. If more expensive connections for video or supercomputers
are needed for particular research programs they should be budgeted for
separately. 

>If have the wrong idea about what AARnet is really for
>then please accept my apologies.  If it's mainly for e-mail type
>communications then I'm certainly barking up the wrong tree.

AARNET is mainly for e-mail type communications (including "news" and
also "ftp" which could also be handled more efficiently using an "e-mail
type" store and forward approach). Those are the things that AARNET is
OVERWHELMINGLY used for (and IMMENSELY useful for).

What makes it VASTLY superior to the many corporate networks that have
MUCH higher bandwidth is it's CONNECTIVITY. There are 7 to 14 million
people with access to the Internet, whereas the largest commercial
email services are much smaller and the corporate email systems within
most offices are hardly interconnected at all beyond the same enterprise.

When email type applications become widely enough used, e.g. as a result of
ENCOURAGING undergraduate use instead of trying to limit it, one might 
find at least some of the larger Universities upgrading their access links 
from their present use of LESS than the capacity of a SINGLE ISDN voice 
circuit, to the point where one could begin to think about video (say
two orders of magnitude).

As a matter of fact other applications that involve at least moderate
real-time interactive transit delay requirements, such as telnet, have
been largely unusable during normal hours across the main trunks of AARNET 
for months at a time due to congestion, without much complaint from the user 
base.

BTW, I'm all in favour of such applications. I'm also entirely in favour
of supercomputer research, and B-ISDN research and genetic engineering 
research and Radio Telescopes and mathematical research. I just
don't think a research budget specifically allocated to AARNET should be
ripped off for some other purpose. Radio Telescopes are a wonderful idea
and access to one through AARNET would no doubt be useful, but you can't
divert an AARNET research budget into building a Radio Telescope. For
the same reason you can't divert it into B-ISDN or video-conferencing.

>I suppose who actually provides the physical links between sites as
>distinct from within a site is the big important question I'm raising
>here.

The answer is that the physical links between sites are provided by the 
telecos. Did you think AARNET launches satellites or lays cables between
the major cities of Australia or erects towers on mountain tops along
the inter-city routes? Next big important question please.

A more interesting question is why does an organization which provides
the physical links between sites want to ripoff the research budget of
a very small customer, in "exchange" for allowing that customer to 
beta-test the experimental B-ISDN network it announced three years ago
at the pay TV inquiry. (This is not a rhetorical question, I don't
claim to understand the motivation.)

"The Australian" newspaper of Monday October 12 has a full page ad from 
Telecom:

"$40 billion speaks a lot for Australia's future.

"Over the next five years, Australia's Telecom will continue to be the
biggest investor in Australia. No other company can match our staggering 
$40 billion commitment to deliver to all Australians the world's best
telecommunications services. That's why when it comes to investing in
Australia, we really are putting our money where your mouth is."

It just doesn't make sense for an organization the size of Telecom to
be behaving like this. The number of full page ads it will need to
recover from putting it's snout where our pocket is, will greatly
exceed any benefit from ripping off $13 million of AARNET resesarch funds.

>Not sure what you're getting at here.  I'm just interested in high speed
>networks for work to push Australia into the 21st century and improve
>our chances of developing new ideas for the world market, and avoid us
>becoming a banana republic (if it's not too late). 

Wow! Are you in some kind of competition for how many cliches can be
rolled into a single paragraph?

A characteristic of banana republics is that they are easily sold on
inappropriate technologies - building skyscrapers in cities surrounded
by slums.

As the Apple marketing slogan goes:

"If we had a computer people didn't like using we'd talk in mips
and megahertz too."

You sound just like the guy from IBM who complained that the RDN-CRC
workshop was going off the rails and there had been a complete turnaround
when a few people pointed out that their problems with networking seemed
unlikely to be solved by B-ISDN, let alone the Gigabit networks he was
talking about. Instead of "banana republic" he said such talk
reminded him of "Somalia" and amounted to "putting Australia on a drip
feed". He claimed we must "drive our thinking to the high end of the
bandwidth".

This attempt to "drive our thinking" is "very IBM". It goes far to 
explain why IBM Australia operates a small screwdriver assembly plant
in Wangaratta which is unable to compete with Taiwan clones and why it's
parent company is now cutting back about a quarter of it's workforce.

The phrases that you and IBM come up with about pushing Australia
into the 21st century (wow! 8 years!) are the sort of stuff that 
John Batman used to buy Melbourne from the Aborigines for beads
and mirrors.

The "Director of Science and Technology" from the Wangaratta screwdriver
assembly plant mentioned that he personally was on both the two committees
that contributed to a "high speed" focus instead of upgrading AARNET. I
took the trouble to lookup the paper prepared by an "independent working
group" for the Prime Minister's Science Council ("Information Technology
and Telecommunications, Looking to the Year 2000", 18 May 1992). It reminds
me of the "Telecom 2000" report which predicted continued growth in Telex
traffic and ignored the looming problems with junction network capacity,
except that it is far more flakey despite being only 8 years from the
year 2000 instead of more than 20 years.

Here's the rationale given for a focus on "high speed":

"[...] The next step in the evolution of [High Performance Computing] in
Australia is to run such packages with Australian skills and export the
services over high bandwidth networks.[...]"

"A direct wide bandwidth link to north Asia would be a superb infrastructure
upon which to build and expand exports into Asia, and would have an effect
similar to the establishment of the direct air link to Taiwan."

In other words, by diverting research funds from upgrading AARNET to
beta-testing B-ISDN, Australia is going to be able to build an export
market for supercomputer services with the supercomputers located in
Australia and the end users linked across a "data highway" from Asia.

This again is "very IBM" - just keep on trying to find a way to hook
dumb terminals to those mainframes, even if you have to cross continents
to do it!

In fact of course a Gigabit data highway IS already being built from
Australia to north Asia (the PacRimWest optical fibre cable at 560Mbps
will connect to the already installed Guam, Phillipines, Taiwan cable GPT2 
by December 1994, and thus also to the already installed Hong Kong, Japan,
Korea cable HJK). With any luck this should keep up with the bandwidth
required by the REAL development of increasing commercial ties to the
countries Australians buy both PCs and supercomputers from. 

WIDE use of communications REQUIRES high bandwidth carrier links, even if only 
to provide thousands of voice circuits. The "visionary experiments in social
engineering" called for by IBM's videoconferencing University partners do
NOT accelerate requirements for high technology but hinder them.

Why on earth Fujitsu would want to ship supercomputers to Australia from 
north Asia and then buy back the services is a mystery to be explained by 
IBM Australia's "Director of Mumbo-Jumbo".

If the notable Wangaratta PC assembler examined what the direct air link
to Taiwan is ACTUALLY being used for, they might notice that the market
for Taiwan clones in Australia is so brisk that they actually ship them
by air instead of sea!
 
I don't have much respect for the Australian Government's judgment and
suspect it could have been a typo or bureaucratic mixup, but the Minister
for Science DID delete the reference to "high speed" from the announcement
about a Research Data Network Cooperative Research Center for upgrading
the EXISTING AARNET.

The following paragraph from the Science Council paper, as amended,
is a pretty reasonable basis for the decision actually announced:

"Australia needs to establish a [high quality] R&D network infrastructure
nationally and internationally that will allow Australia to participate and
compete in global IT&T economies. Such a network will revolutionise the
ability of Australian enterprises, researchers and educators to carry out
collaborative research, development and education activities, regardless
of the physical location of the participants or the computational resources
to be used. The network would enhance the current Australian Academic 
Research Network (AARNet) operated by the Australian Vice Chancellors
Committee (AVCC). Its implementation must give particular attention to
the requirements of industry.[...]"

The original had "high speed" instead of "high quality", which again
is "very IBM" and continued to say "The initial cost will between $30
million and $45 million", without any mention of what one would get
for that "initial" cost or what the total cost might end up being. More
from IBM.

But precisely those "flakey" aspects did NOT appear in the Minister's
announcement of the AARNET research grant. Whether by fluke or not,
the decision was to avoid commitments to unproven grandiose claims
and "experiments in social engineering" and simply agree that research 
should be done on upgrading the existing network. Nothing about "high speed", 
nothing about exporting supercomputer services to Asia over data highways. 
No "videoconferencing". Just a perfectly sensible research grant to belatedly 
meet a very obvious need.

Australia needs a "high quality" network that people can USE more
productively and that can link the research community (including
people who do NOT think that DNS addresses are "human readable")
with industry, commerce and other less important sections of society
like the majority of the population. The rest of the world could use
something like that too so there must be an export market. 

Interestingly, among the people who would 
"benefit" from handing over AARNET's research grant to do beta testing of 
Telecom's B-ISDN experimental network was listed "importers of B-ISDN and ATM
switches"! Not even the PRETENCE of any local industrial involvement
or export market. As a matter of fact "importers" were the ONLY concrete 
beneficiaries listed, the rest of the "benefits" being just general marketing 
waffle.

Most offices still use snail mail and fax to exchange simple wordprocessor
documents. We need at least a message transfer service that will allow end 
users to just indicate who they want to send a document to and not bother 
about "addresses" and "format" and other such archaic nonsense. A document
filing and retrieval service slightly more useable than ftp would also be
nice. Directory service is needed for both and a distributed office
applications model can include many more applications using those basic
building blocks. International standards for this sort of thing have been in 
place for quite a while now.

Might not actually turning the research already done into DEVELOPMENT
be productive for both academic research users of AARNET and industry,
and result in products that could be exported to other countries with
similar primitive office communications - like the various countries on
planet earth? 

Once it was possible to actually transfer a simple PC wordprocessor 
document between different organizations
without major hassles, wouldn't that lead to more complex documents being
transmitted, including videoclips and other forms of multi-media, thus
creating requirements for higher bandwidth in the natural way?

Wouldn't that result in a more impressive "networked nation" than any
amount of "talking heads" video conferences among a select few who
find endless fascination in looking at themselves on TV?

>I'm not that
>interested in the home use of networks for so called leisure activities.
>There's enough rubbish on normal TV - I don't want more of it and have
>to pay for it!

At least normal TV tries to avoid excessive use of "talking heads" which
most people find boring to watch. The MAIN application which Telecom's
most favoured University partner came up with for B-ISDN was 
"video-conferencing", which means "talking heads". They also suggested
that only "some" Universities needed to be connected to the higher
speed network so that they could experiment with video conferencing.

Do YOU think that would be the highest priority application for research
funds to upgrade AARNET, if AARNET users had any say in the matter?

If they want overnight delivery of video clips, why can't they use
the postal service like everybody else?