>>It's not the backbone where the problem lies. It's getting there. The Last
Mile and the "edge" technologies (routers and
switches) are making the bottleneck.<<
Granted, in general situations, at least. But we were talking about a rather
closed setting here, i.e., the academic/research institutions who are members
of I2. In the I2 model, the arrangement seemed rather doable and robust for
the last mile for many of the institutions. Witness the annualized costs cited
in one of the previous messages, which stipulates that UW-Madison would
pay only ~$30,000 to $50,000 per annum for access.
Although, the article doesn't say what capacity that bandwidth actually is:
"I2 is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) <http://www.nsf.gov/> and by dues paid from member institutions. UW-Madison received an NSF grant to pay two years' worth of half the costs associated with connecting to the vBNS. The final costs for connecting to Abilene are $30-50,000 per year."
If that cost covers only a T3, then it is still only about 10% of commercial
rates for a Tier One BB provider. For some reason, however, I think that it
would cover at least an OC-3, perhaps much higher, given the scale of
Abilene's aspirations.
|
