LOCAL INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDER UPDATE
South Coast Telecommunications Alliance (SCTA)
June 26, 1997 Meeting
Held at General Research Corporation International, Santa Barbara CA
Meeting Notes by Dev Vrat: imago@silcom.comAttendance: Approximately 50
Speakers: Frank Dziuba for Silicon Beach/WestNet/Avtel; Roger Endo for SB Net; Ken Alker for Impulse; Mel Beckman for Systems & Software Consortium, Inc (SSCI); and Matt Ryan for Call America/GST. (Marcy Montgomery for RAIN participated earlier via e-mail).
WELCOME/INTRODUCTIONS:
After everyone had an opportunity to secure refreshments, SCTA Coordinator John Wiley opened the meeting by inviting self-introductions around the room.. Regular participants may be identified from the "Participant list": on the SCTA Web Site (see URL below). Many new participants introduced themselves.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
Supreme Court decides that censorship on the Internet violates First Amendment of the Constitution. "The Internet has grown up." (John Wiley)
Possible new Adult Ed lecture series" "The Edge: Technology at Work" (John Wiley).
SBCC has been reserved as the venue for TeleCommunity II on November 21 or 22. Another option is the Wake Center depending on the anticipated size of the event. Please show your interest by subscribing to the TCU-II mailing list (Joe Mortz and Chuck Ryan)
Systems Software Consortium has started a new computer recycling program. The County of Santa Barbara donated numerous 286s and 386s. SSCI has employed several San Marcos High School students to revamp the computers (Michael Ditmore)
SCTA e-mail Listserver: If you'd like to follow SCTA activities, you are invited to subscribe to the SCTA e-mail lists. Instructions may be found on the SCTA web site (URL below).
Santabarbara.com is now at SSCI and going online with NT server. No dial-up -- just web
server (John Dickerson).FORMAL PRESENTATION:
LOCAL ISPS (INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDERS)
DANA SIMMONS OF FINDSVP provided a brief presentation of the results of the American Internet User Survey. According to the survey 74% of Internet users access the net only via local ISP (Only 26% use national providers).
UCSB: John Wiley reminded us about our local Internet Grand Daddy -- UCSB. The University was one of the first nodes on the Internet and the first to provide local access a decade before anyone else. Thank you to UCSB.
MATTHEW RYAN, GST CALL AMERICA: Call Amercia was founded in 1983. Target market is business customers only. They have been on the Internet two years. No personal accounts. They resell to suppliers: Avtel, Fixnet, the Grid. They are a reseller of GTE and CBell. GST is laying fiber optics. Local dialtone will be available within two years. Combining voice and data. A year ago the focus was on dial-up and frame relay. Now its DS3s. Call America buys from major providers to spread risk. Their perception of customer needs is "integrated services." They are working toward a "one stop shop." Customers are one phone call away from problem resolution. Matthew does not believe that national ISPs will cause demise of local ISPs. People want service. Call America provides lots of front end service --especially during first two months. Their goal is superior customer service.
FRANK DZIUBA: SILICON BEACH, WESTNET, AVTEL: Frank has done a lot for local connectivity: Hollister School, SCTA, TriMix TeleCommunity. He came to Santa Barbara because he "Wanted to be obscure." His colleagues have said he is incapable of being obscure. Silicon Beach was started to provide reliable business connections. Frank confessed that Silicon Beach was started on a SPARC 2 computer three years ago in April. Silicon Beach merged with AVTEL and ""UTW (Salt Lake City, UT). 90% of Avtels's customers are in the Santa Barbara area using 4.5 meg of its backbone capability. Avtels goal is to provide service to business customers. Local ISPs know local customers. National ISPs relate best to national corporations. AVTEL is a national seller of phone systems. In order to deliver service Avtel needs access to the wire. So Avtel became a phone company. Right some companies are competing to deliver voice over the wire. Others are competing to deliver data. These will all combine: phone, cell and internet. People don't like to get five bills. Avtel is working to design an integrated billing system from scratch. Avtel helps people with what want they want to use the Internet for. The company provides access between enterprise locations and between enterprises and their employees. Working on a DS3 45 megabit data stream. Silicon Beach customers will soon be able to dial up on WestNet and vice versa. The short term goal is to provide this type of connectivity in California -- then national. Avtel will go national without building infrastructure. The people who formed AVTEL came to Santa Barbara because they wanted to liver here. This is the beauty of this business. The newest technology is ADSL. We will have Ethernet box on our homes connected to computer with 1.5 to 10 megabits data rates. Cable companies will not deliver this. We will have movies on demand and extremely fast Internet access.
KEN AKER, IMPULSE INTERNET SERVICES: Impulse now employs seven people with single and dual channel ISDN. If local ISPs really wanted to make money they would start companies in Texas or Illinois where there are millions of customers with one phone exchange. Here we have four exchanges without common local phone calls. The same equipment must developed for each of the local exchanges. Impulse has Bought out several smaller local providers. It now has 200 modems throughout Santa Barbara County and covers 90% of Ventura County. Impulse just crossed the 2000 user mark., 100 virtual domains. ISDN lines in Lompoc Santa Barbara and Santa Ynez. They are looking at Santa Maria and Moorpark. They have 20 frame relay lines. They offer Ethernet, web page design, and feed to smaller ISPs. They own their own building in Goleta. Lease out to web designers and engineering firms. They support dedicated business lines and dial up -- home users as well. They have 3 support engineers who work week-days and Saturdays.
MEL BECKMAN, SYSTEMS AND SOFTWARE CONSORTIUM, INC (SSCI): Mel is an editor for both Windows NT and MacWorld, which shows you where he is coming from. SSCI was formed by about 100 companies to develop a high speed local network for access and collaboration. SSCI is running two 45 megabits per second T3s. SSCI meets the need for high speed internet access today. There are two types of Internet access: dial-up and dedicated access. SSCI provides dedicated access only at T-1 speeds or higher. These companies can configure their own computers. No service -- just rock solid access. SSCI has redundant components that fall over automatically. SSCI provides "Internet water." Turn SSCI on and the Internet comes out. Internet is delivered on Ethernet. Easy to configure, expandable, businesses are used to dealing with it. Routers may be foreign and difficult to configure. SCSI always provides a circuit -- always a box there when the user is ready to connect. SSCI has over 100 connections, T-1 speeds. Can be changed to ADSL. No e-mail, web serving, etc. Up 99.7% of the time. Right now using less then 10% of its capacity. Plenty of band with. In the future, band with will get cheaper. Eventually we will have a T-1 to our homes. SSCI provides this bandwidth today. Any company can still become a member of SSCI. There are a lot of benefits besides fast Internet access.
ROGER ENDO. SBNET: Roger graduated from one of the most difficult programs in the nation -- combined BS/MS in Computer Engineering from UCSB. SBNet provides flexible services on small pentiums with freeware UNIX. Roger considers his company a grown up BBS. Another focus of SBNet is to develop software for the Internet. He has a full scale commerce product with merchants on it right now. This product will be rolled out nationally soon. It will feature tools to get people to come back to your website.
RAIN: John Wiley summarized an e-mail Marcy Montgomery had sent to SCTA earlier.
Printouts were available in the back of the room. RAIN was founded by Timothy Tyndall in 1991 with help from UCSB and an assortment of companies, organizations and volunteers. They grew rapidly, and the founders of most local ISPs were RAIN users and volunteers at some point.They're now involved in a UCSB Extension project to deliver Internet and education into local low income housing and Boys and Girls Clubs, and have also worked with local museums and other agencies.
Marcy reports that they're planning an upgrade to 56k modems and possibly a DS3, and they're talking with SLONET about a merger. She says their non-profit programs remain in demand, and that having been founded by teachers and librarians has given RAIN a distinctly educational mission. Their Community Internet Center at 1129 State Street has programs for non-profits, businesses, youth and families.
QUESTION AND ANSWER PERIOD:
What about national access? Call American has 800 access at 10 cents per minute.
Which 56K modem should I buy? There are two competing technologies: Rockwell K56+ and US Robotics X2. Advice was to stay put at 33.6 and "wait and see" for a standard to develop. The two companies are merging so a standard is inevitable. It is possible that neither will be the standard.
How is the community building on Coastlines going? Silicon Beach provided the tools. The News-Press is working on it. There is Andre Durand Groupware on the site for community networking.
RAIN is starting to charge non-Profits. Some non-profits may be looking for new ISPs. Why don't the other local ISPs provide more support to the community? The ISPs are businesses. They have to be run as businesses. It takes a lot of money to be an ISP. For example, SLONet is starting to focus on working with community instead of trying to be all things to all people. Actually there is a lot of community content out there now: Coastlines, KEYT, SantaBarbara.Com, SantaBarbara.Web. July 15th is the target for public access at libraries.
What is the schedule and price projection for ASDL? "Dry Copper" wire is available now and ADSL will run on it. However, two $1500 modems are needed at each end of the wire. Call America is putting fiber in ground now. We are moving to a true network where the local traffic stays local. However, the rest of the Internet is not ready yet. Technology is out in front. ADSL lowers the cost of local carrier traffic. Does not solve the national problem.
What about satellite data transmission? It's here now. There is delay however. The future is in spread spectrum radio. Lots of little transmitters close together. Rf mesh network. Los Gatos has Metrocom. Locally there is Utilicom. $2000 per point. 56K wireless modems. Wireless e-mail only with limited web browsing.
What about cable modems? When is the last time you heard about a cable company which provided a quality product at a low price?
CONCLUSION
Special thanks to our sponsors: Connected Systems for sponsoring the meetings and refreshments, the Water Store at 5342-B Hollister for pure drinking water and dispenser, and Silicon Beach Communications for connectivity.
No July or August meeting planned. Watch the SCTA listserver for meeting announcements.
INFORMAL NETWORKING PERIOD
Note: Change in Meeting day, and Location of meeting within remodeled GRCI Complex (watch for new map on SCTA website).
http://www.silcom.com/scta
SCTA Home Page: http://www.silcom.com/scta/
SCTA Minutes Index: http://www.silcom.com/scta/minutes.html