Minutes of seventh SCTA meeting
9/21/94

The meeting was started at 7:20 by Anne Cameron. 56 attendees were 
present. A few more came later.

John Wiley read the SCTA Goals, and Anne stated that we're not here to 
promote any particular interests, just to promote ideas and collaboration 
in the field of community networking.

The following announcements were made:
Michael Masterson announced their radio show, the Information Super 
RestStop on KTMS (AM 1250) Saturdays at 5:30 PM. Darryl from Caddyshack 
announced tha Internet email and tri.* newsgroups are available free on 
their Bulletin Board System (BBS), at 805-683-4244. Caddyshack supports 
Quick Mail for offline reading of email, and will be "hubbing" for other 
BBS's. Jan Ballard from Durand Communications announced that the 5th year 
of Leadership Santa Barbara is starting.

There is an opportunity to teach non-profits about telecommunications and 
help set them up. Contact Sharon Clausen (sclaus@silcom.com). Computer 
Focus has a teaching space in Goleta which they can offer to community 
organizations in the area. Call 681-8343 and ask for Michael Woodill.
Volunteer citizen involvement development opportunities are available 
through Jan Ballard from Durand Communications. 

Michael Masterson introduced a video, produced by Pacific Telesis, then 
played the video. It was a short program about some potential uses of 
electronic communications technology.

Bill McClure, Network Planning Manager from GTE, made a presentation.
 
"GTE is building the network that will allow us to access all the world's 
libraries." Bill went on to describe many services offered by GTE.

SONET is a Synchronous Optical Network, which is "self healing."

FORT: Fiber Optic Ring Technology, which is mostly used by large business 
customers. There are currently fiber optic cables from Santa Maria to 
Santa Barbara. GTE is building a fiber optic ring in downtown SB, which 
is self healing too. All local areas will be on FORT by 1997. Digital 
Switching; all central offices in SB & Ventura counties are digital, 
generally underground. 

TESTING: 4-Tel is a testing program which is run nightly to find problems 
before customers do. It allows on-demand testing. This is all controlled 
from the Network Operations Center in Dallas.

Fiber Cable: 95% of interoffice routes are fiber now; will be 100% by 
'95. Next generation digital loop carriers are evolving towards broadband 
net to the home.

Fractional T-1 (T-1 is 1.544 Million bits per second [Mbps]) allows 2, 4, 
or 6 64,000 ( 64 Kbps) connections. and can be carried on copper wire. 
It's available at all SB offices today.

Quick Connect: IntraLATA local/wide area connectivity service; switched 
voice/data over existing phone lines; supports up to 19.2 Kbps.

SDS(Switched data) both Switched 56 and 64 Kbps. Available most 
everywhere. If this type of service is used more than 2-3 hours per day 
it is more economical, generally, to have a leased line or other type of 
service. There were many questions regarding rates. About 1/2 of 
attendees were in favor of another SCTA meeting to discuss GTE rates.

ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network): all digital end to end, voice 
& data over same line; SB, Las Positas, Ellwood offices are up now; 
Goleta, Carpinteria, and Montecito will be up by the end of the year; all 
other local offices will be up by '95. In Ventura County, ISDN is 
currently in Thousand Oaks; they're just starting in Ventura, all of 
Ventura County will be up by the end of '95 (those areas served by GTE). 
ISDN can talk to ISDN and Switched 56 only for digital; voice is 
compatible with other services.

There are 2 types of ISDN: 2B/1D; B= 64Kbps, D is 16Kbps. Anything up to 
14Kft from office works well; further requires some engineering. A T-1 
line can carry 23 B channels (64Kbps each), 1 D Channel (64Kbps). Frame 
Relay is one of the more interesting services; it is a connection 
oriented virtual circuit service. The following types of service are 
available: 56 Kbps, N * 64Kbps (ie as many 64Kbps channels as desired), 
1.544 Mbps (T-1). Frame Relay is data only; no voice or video, but can be 
used for image transfer; it's currently available in all of SB & Ventura 
Counties. It is a flat rate, fixed price, which is not mileage or data 
sensitive pricewise. T-1 is circuit switched; frame relay is packet 
switched. T-1 guarantees bandwidth, frame relay doesn't. Frame relay 
works better for bursty traffic; T-1 is better for continuous throughput. 
Frame Relay allows a "virtual meshed network."

MMDS: Multi Media Data Service; point to point or point to multipoint, 
available within the LATA only. Currently there is no demand for SMDS in 
SB County; but will be put in if demand arises. SMDS is not currently 
planned, but could happen quickly. 

ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Method): combines voice, data and video 
together. It uses "cell switching," using fixed length cells; 
45Mbps-622Mbps data rates are currently available; in the future up to 
2.4 Gbps will be possible. There is an ATM switch in SB (SB office) 
currently, also there is one being tested in Ventura County. It is used 
for very high speed applications, like medical X-Ray imaging. Things are 
happening rapidly with ATM right now in the marketplace.

Video Connect will provide multi-level connections. The technology is 
available; the service will be available when tariffs are determined.

Video Dial Tone is planned in '95 in Ventura; it's a hybid fiber/Coax 
design that provides interactive video. Many more sites are planned for 
'96-'97. It's higher speed than T-1; much higher. Carriers cannot provide 
content currently. GTE hopes that will change.

Dave Oster then gave a presentation.

He builds customer premise equipment for data communications. The ideas 
for his proposal have come from many sources.

The proposal is for a "Metropolitan Area Network," using the Internet as 
a model. There is a need for the community to put together a network 
everybody can share. The technology is currently available; Frame Relay 
has been proposed because it's high speed and low cost. The community 
network could use a combination of Frame Relay, ISDN, and SMDS if we 
wanted to. SMDS could be a later step up.

Why do it? Because: it could eliminate potential network traffic jams; it 
provides cheaper access to high-speed lines; there could be community 
control of its development; it would provide shared, not proprietary, 
access to outlying areas; and it links up network islands (RAIN, UCSB, 
SBCC, Silicon Beach, etc). To get from Silicon Beach to RAIN it currently 
requires 12 hops from SB to Seattle and back to Goleta, because of 
Internet architecture and the way the various services are linked into 
it. With a local backbone, this would go away as a problem.

Benefits include: providing regional "universal access" to information 
resources becomes more economically feasible; a robust regional network 
would be immune to Internet traffic jams; it decreases the cost and 
improves the performance of remote access for telecommuting "knowledge 
workers," attracting those workers to the region and encouraging local 
companies to stay and use the network for telecommuting; focus on a local 
backbone stimulates communication and collaboration between local 
businesses and groups; and it could provide locally controlled orderly 
network growth as usage demands it. With Frame Relay, you can save money 
over a regular phone line because of the fixed rates. It should be an IP 
network because for SB clients purchasing services from internet 
providers now, it would look the same.

Applications: communication between medical care workers and 
administration; social service check-in for disabled or elderly; 
telecommuters in outlying communities; access to local community and 
governmental information; forum for community feedback; connect up local 
businesses with manufacturing or accounting departments in separate 
locations; graphics designers could transmit finished work to clients in 
a reasonable amount of time; and many many others, too numerous to 
mention. 

Organization: open to anyone; costs are shared by participants; community 
hub should be sponsored by a non-commercial entity; contract for 
management could be put out for bid; policy making could be shared by a 
committee of participants. It's just a network; it doesn't provide any 
services other than traffic routing and data flow; it would probably need 
a range of IP addresses. Could obviate the need for all these different 
services to provide modem pools; terminal servers would provide access to 
this net, and you might be able to access your network access provider 
with local calls from remote areas.

Colocating was discussed; this is the concept of the customer having to 
pay the service provider (GTE) to buy and maintain equipment to provide 
the service the customer wants.

Once the technology is available and you are subscribed to a Frame Relay 
Permanent Virtual Circuit (PVC), you can buy another PVC for $10/mo! This 
is useful for applications requiring up to 56Kbps throughput a lot of the 
time. 56Kbps PVC with no mileage or data restrictions is available for 
$125/mo. So a user would buy one of those to be on the community hub.

How many initial clients would there be? Subscribers would be medium to 
large businesses in the area; no studies have been done per se. There are 
60-80 high tech businesses that could potentially benefit immediately 
from this type of service.

Cost: $600 for installation; $125/mo for 1st 56K PVC, $10/mo for each 
additional PVC, monthly hub management and access charge TBD, Frame Relay 
routing equipment $1500 - $6000. 

There was a lively question and answer period following Dave's 
presentation. It was determined that this subject would be discussed on 
the sctalk list for a while, with periodic summaries posted to scta-list. 
There could potentially be a follow-up event to discuss the Community 
Backbone idea further, and perhaps to develop an implementation plan of 
some sort.

10/19 is the date of the next SCTA meeting, 7:00 PM at Antioch. 

Note: if there are any inaccuracies in these minutes (the information was 
flowing rapidly) please contact me through email and we'll make the 
corrections. These minutes could be a valuable source of facts about the 
local communications infrastructure and every effort should be made to 
keep it accurate!

Dale Taylor
Resource Associates
Santa Barbara, CA, USA
805-899-4670; FAX 805-899-4870; Internet dale@rain.org rasb@beach.silcom.com