Date: Sun, 10 Apr 1994 17:22:44 -0400 From: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein) To: com-priv@psi.com Subject: Need Help Articulating Internet Benefits This is something I wrote a while ago on this topic. It still needs some cleaning up (corrections welcome, flames not so welcome) and expansion but I think it does cover some of the core of this question reasonably well. Others have found it useful. I did a quick pass just now to fix some glaring errors but that's all -Barry Shein Software Tool & Die | bzs@world.std.com | uunet!world!bzs Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 617-739-0202 | Login: 617-739-WRLD Why Your Company Should Hook Up To The Internet by Barry Shein Software Tool & Di bzs@world.std.com Disclaimer: This is an early draft (8/5/92). INTRODUCTION This will be a very focused piece on the why's of hooking up to the Internet, not the how's nor an attempt to explain exactly what the internet is. I assume the reader knows what the internet is at some technical level and is now looking for business reasons to convince their management to pay for a hook-up. Also, I am focusing on direc internet connections, not dial-up store-and-forward connections such as UUCP. It is important to understand that there are really two or more mainline Internets. There is the research portion and the non-research portion. Although they normally speak to each other this is no necessary. The reason this is important is because you cannot conduct for-profit business on the research portion, but you can conduct such business on the non-research networks. For-profit would include commercial by-pass, such as hooking up two of your sites' e-mail vi the internet (unless, of course, you could convince NSF that this is research or educationally related.) I will tend to focus on the non-research internet and non-research aspects. In particular, what you should understand is something called the "CIX", the Commercial Internet Exchange, which is a consortium of internet network vendors who agree to mutually allow commercial "ok" connections and activities. By and large for commercial hookups this is the main game in the USA and some other countries although if you are not in the US you should check with local networking organization (e.g. EUNET in Europe. GENERAL Assuming you need a wide area network, even for the most basic purposes, the first question you want to ask yourself is: Do you want to USE a network, or do you want to RUN (and design) a network If you're like most people, you don't want to run or design a network, you just want to use one The internet is a ready-made network that spans much of the world with very good, high-speed links throughout the USA, Canada, Europe, Th Pacific Rim and elsewhere. Much of the rest of the world, including many less developed countries, are reachable at least via electronic mail through this same internet. If your business has offices or colleagues you need to communicate with frequently and you're paying on the order of US$1,000 per month or so in long-distances calls, faxes, and document and data delivery (FedEx, UPS etc) to keep in touch then you want to seriously consider an internet hookup. There are two basic ways to hook up to the internet, either by direct internet connection or dial-up via terminal emulation. The first is what might be called a full internet connection, the latter is much less expensive and generally limited to text oriented applications. One major advantage of a dial-up account via terminal emulation is that it's very inexpensive (around $20/month/account) so is a way to begin exploring the internet and making it part of your corporat culture before trying to justify the expense of a full interne connection. Much of the power of the internet is accessible via simple dial-up accounts, and besides being inexpensive it requires almost zero technical knowledge, just any common communications package such as Zterm for the Mac or Telix for the PC (both of these are available as shareware), or any number of inexpensive packages. For Unix you can similarly use tip or cu which are probably on your system already or get a copy of Kermit (kermit supports error-free file transfer as wel so is preferable to tip or cu.) Kermit is free. For a direct internet hook up, assuming you already have a TCP/IP capable LAN or are willing to develop one (note that this is just an add on feature for Novell and AppleTalk LANs, and many Uni workstations already have this software included) you basically jus get a box which will plug between your LAN and a line ordered from th phone company, and you're on. This will of course entail some charges including start-up and access fees. Here is a typical budget for a 56kb line One-Time Router $6,000 This is the box that goes into your Lan DSU/CSU $ 750 This is a box that takes the leased line and converts the signal for the router. Line Install $ 750 Varies from regional telco to telco Start-Up $2,000 ------ $9,500 Some of these fees can often be pro-rated by the network vendor into your monthly charges. Monthly Line $ 500 This goes to the phone company Network $1,000 This goes to the network company ----- $1,500 Note that these are just estimates based on my (very real) experiences hooking people up to a particular network vendor. The conclusion should be that even for modest sized companies this will not be a major expense, although it is not trivial either. The advantage of hooking up like this is that you can replicate this in other offices in other cities throughout the world (international charges will vary quite a bit, but the above is roughly accurate for anywhere in the USA) and instantly be able to communicate at high-speeds to your other offices and colleagues as well as the millions of other people on the net. You do not have to pay for long-distance leased lines between offices, these are all subsidized into the monthly network charges. You just hook each office into the closest access point. They don't even have to use the same network vendor in each case as they all speak with each other compatibly (at least in the case of CIX members.) Better, you don't have to design that network. Hooking up two offices is, admittedly, a cinch for someone with even modest telecommunications savvy. Hooking up five or more offices can be a nightmare unless you really know what you are doing Hooking those same five offices via the internet is a cinch and requires almost no intricate knowledge of the problem, you just order the hook-ups much as you would order phone lines Even where there is a need for internal network set-up the network vendors can generally provide people who will come in and help for a fee, usually quite reasonable. The important point is that you are working with people who are very knowledgeable about the problem and motivated to help you get hooked up, you're not on your own, you won't need to "re-invent the wheel". When you consider that managing your own network would probably take at least one full time person at approximately $100K/year fully loaded it's not hard to begin rationalizing the costs if you have considere a wide-area network as an answer to your communications needs These hookups are volume-insensitive in most cases. This means that you can transmit as little or as much data as the lines will carr without incurring metered charges. Your costs are fixed and predictable. Compare that with your current long-distance, overnight delivery and fax costs! I should point out that there are metered services such as something called "Dial-Up SLIP" which are metered, at least by the phone company as you use your regular telephone lines and modems to hook-up. These are low-cost-of-entry hookups for very low-volume users but generally not recommended for modest to high volume use, although they can be a good way (and often economical) for small offices to get started on the network, or to hook up that small branch office without incurrin all the startup charges that might be more reasonable for your larger branches. You can certainly mix and match different levels of service at different locations. Electronic Mail You can send electronic mail to hundreds of thousands of sites on the internet, millions of people. Between connected sites mail usually moves anywhere in the world in well under a minute. I often se deliveries between my office in Boston and sites in Australia in a little as 4 seconds Mail is not limited to text messages, although those can be very useful. You can also mail files, binary files and programs, graphical images, fax images, sound, etc. with the right software and procedures. In many cases this software is freeware and may even be o your system already. For example, on Unix systems binary files can be packed up with uuencode and, if necessary, split up with the native "split" command, and shipped very reliably and in seconds anywhere in the world through electronic mail Standards and software are currently appearing which allow the transparent inclusion of files of many types into electronic mail messages Because electronic mail is inherently store and forward it is remarkably robust in the face of network or computer problems This means that your mailer (or that of the next hop along the way will keep trying to deliver mail (typically every thirty minutes afte a failure) until it gets through, or else it will inform you after some time that delivery was impossible (often warning you that it is continuing to try long before it gives up.) Because probably well over 99% of the electronic mail that is properl addressed gets delivered within a few tries this means that employees do not have to tie up their time with the network equivalents of "bus signals." It's fire and forget in almost all cases and if there's any temporary problem along the way the electronic mail software takes care of it automatically. Remember all those times you or your employees had to stand by a fax machine while a remote fax was busy, or had to repeatedly call another office just to read a few pieces o information over the phone or relay a memo? Well, with electronic mail that problems is almost entirely gone. And because direct internet hookups are volume insensitive in their pricing you can send enormous quantities of information betwee computers without fretting about the costs. For example, on a 56Kb line you can send the equivalent of a 300 page novel between offices, about 500KB, in approximately two minutes, with no added charges to your bills. This is not true of many commercial electronic mail vendors such as ATTmail which charge per message and by volume, not to mention that you usually pay all the per-call line charges with those services. There are hundreds (perhaps thousands) of public mailing lists on specific topics distributed through electronic mail. There's almost never any charge and to join you just send your electronic mai address to the appropriate e-mail address and they add you (or remove you when you want.) Some very popular lists are INFO-NETS (general discussion on networks), Sun-Managers (a highly technical group for Sun Microsystems Computer administrators' problem solving), Telecom Digest (techno-political discussion of the telecommunications industry), and everything ranging from humor to kids to engineering to politics. FILE TRANSFER Files can be transferred between sites on the internet with a fe keystrokes using a program called FTP (File Transfer Protocol.) typical session (under Unix) looks like: % ftp other.site.name Login: yourname Password: yourpassword ftp> get file.name (transfers file from remote site ftp> put file.name2 (transfers file to remote site) ftp> quit Simple as that, and fast also. The example given in the section o electronic mail would apply here also, you can transfer the equivalent of a 300 page novel in about two minutes. And the network automatically ensures that the transfers are error free. FTP can handle either binary or text files transparently, and in just about any volume. Once you are informed that the file has been transferred it is immediately available on the remote system (or your system.) Entire directories or even hierarchies of directories can also be easily transferred with just a few more FTP commands. There exist user interfaces for the Macintosh and IBM/PC's that make these transfers as easy as point and click. For software there are thousands of free "anonymous" FTP sites aroun the world. These allow anyone to login and browse and take copies from their free software collections. TELNET Via the internet you can login to other systems you have accounts on for example between branch offices, without incurring any metere charges. The line is transparently shared between users, so several people can be logged in or performing file transfers at the same time, at worst interactions might slow down if many people use the same line simultaneously. A 56kb line can usually handle 10 or so interactive users with little or no noticeable slow-down, and twice that many for typical useage where there's some think-time between interactions. Even 30 or more simultaneous sessions can be tolerable for many applications on a 56Kb line and, of course, higher-speed lines are merely a matter of money. A T1 line (1.544Mb/s) is approximately 2 times as fast as a 56Kb line for about twice the monthly cost and ca handle about 100 interactive sessions satisfactorily, simultaneous with file transfer, electronic mail, etc. Very demanding, interactive graphics applications, of course, put more load on the line pe session. USENET Usenet is a coordinated collection of over 5,000 discussion topics organized into "newsgroups". These are broken down into a hierarchy such as comp.sys.ibm.pc to discuss issues pertinent to IBM/PC's and rec.food.cooking for discussions about cooking and foods. Anyone can post questions and the technical groups can be a godsend for answering difficult questions that you might otherwise have to employ highly specialized consultants to answer. Oftentimes someone on one of these groups has the answer to your question on the tip of his or her tongue and you've got your solution within a few hours, if not a few minutes. Also on these groups new products get discussed, vendors and their employees clarify aspects of their own products and announce new products, people provide testimonials recommending (or not) products they've had experience with often relating their experiences in great detail, etc. Even if you don't want to manage all this information there are several sites on the internet which, for a modest fee (typically on the order of $20/month per account) will let you access their Usenet system via Telnet. ClariNet ClariNet is organized like Usenet, a hierarchy of topics, and is accessed with the same software. But these groups are read-only and distribute vast quantities of the AP and Reuters newswire (another company, MSEN, also offers the Reuters newswire.) These are broken down into a hierarchy, like Usenet (they use the same software for delivery) such as clari.news.bulletin, clari.sports.olympics, clari.nb.ibm (nb is a collection of news columns covering high-tech business), clari.news.books, clari.biz.market.report, etc. The AP wires and other services get broken down into over 200 different topics by ClariNet. ClariNet is an additional charge service that can be delivered over your internet line. Prices are typically quite modest for an entire wire feed and parts of the wire can be purchased separately. Contac clarinet@clarinet.com for details. Clarinet can also be accessed via telnet at public access sites for a small monthly charge OTHER APPLICATION Many applications exist already which will work over the internet. Because the internet uses highly standardized and pervasive TCP/IP protocols many LAN applications "just work" across this wide-area network. For example, many of the major database vendors already support remote database access across the internet, almost nothing other than setting up permissions needs to be done to enable this. With the internet you can manage a company database in New York while your other offices in San Francisco, London and Singapore access the same data base transparently. There is no need to replicate the database across sites, and this means there is no need to replicate database administration and updates. Network File Sharing such as NFS and Novell (using their TCP/IP software) can work across the higher-speed internet links (56Kb or above.) With some inexpensive software and hardware add-ons your PC' and Macintoshes can also transparently access your files around the world INFORMATION AND OTHER SERVICES Information services are always spawning on the network. Most can be reached via telnet and charge for their services. You can currently access Dialog, the information behemoth with over a terabyte (that's one trillion characters) of databases online including trademarks (both textual and graphical), patents, and many others. Data Research associates (dra.com) maintains an internet hookup which lets you browse the Library of Congress catalog. There are also many free services. For example, with the appropriate software you can access WAIS (Wide Area Information Server) which connects together distributed databases from all over the world, most of these incur no charge. WAIS supports full text search and retrieval. There are approximate 200 databases under WAIS ranging from archives of technical discussion groups on Usenet to law databases and other topics. The WAIS software is free and available (guess where!) on the net. Many vendors offer no-charge anonymous FTP areas providing product specs and information as well as electronic mail addresses to address technical and other queries to their staff. You can purchase books over the internet (or even publish them as many of the majo publishers maintain internet accounts.) Companies such as Pageworks will take your electronic "camera-ready" copy (typically prepared o Macs) via the net and produce offset and litho plates or even manage the entire print production. Other companies will provide demos and working versions (upon payment) of their products via the net. Government agencies are rapidly being deployed on the net. You can currently pick up NSF grant guidelines and announcements via the internet, there are military news services and many other resources. [This is the most important section perhaps and needs a lot more work -B] COST JUSTIFICATIONS First, it's not very expensive for a company, even a small company, to get a direct hook-up to the net. For about the cost of an inexpensive workstation, one-time, plus $1,500/month you can have a very high quality network hookup into your company LAN which can be shared by your entire staff. Because the world-wide internet is managed by the network vendors you staff costs are usually nominal, you don't have to develo telecommunications expertise in-house to connect your company's LANs throughout the world to the internet. It's not much more difficult than ordering phone service. Ready access to free software from thousands of archive sites can often solve your needs without having to purchase commercial packages. And when you need a commercial package you can often get testimonials from current customers, talk with vendors, and even receive the software all over the network. Your staff's technical abilities can be highly leveraged by access to technical discussion groups where that nagging problem that was about to cost you several thousand dollars for a solution suddenly is solved for no cost by some kindred soul on one of these groups. It happen all the time. Or gathering suggestions for product solutions to your needs rather than relying on salespeople who may not always have your best interests at heart. News wire and other information services can keep you in touch and let you search out the information you need electronically. Information can be shipped between your branch offices, often replacing expensive fax and document delivery, electronically and in most cases in a few seconds, anywhere around the world. Remote computer systems at your other sites can be centrally managed via the network. Databases can be shared and maintained at just one site. Software can be distributed, installed and administered remotely by centralized personnel often negating the need for technical systems expertise at each physical location. And, perhaps most importantly, the network and its services are growing at a fantastic pace. It takes time for such services to become part of your corporate culture and work style. Like learning a foreign language, the only good way to become familiar with the net is to immerse yourself and your employees in it. Waiting until every service is fully matured is probably a false economy. You can reap benefit now and, more importantly, you can reap benefits later as they appear only if you have a staff knowledgeable in how to use this technology. Remember, a decade back, when some of your business colleagues bought these new fangled PC's and people laughed and wondered aloud what use they could be? Remember how a few years later those same forward-looking colleagues often benefitted in amazing ways from those computers, often just because they spread them throughout their corporate cultures early? And how others rushed out to buy them lat only to then spend the next year or two trying to figure them out and train their staff while their competitors were already coasting? Are you about to miss an opportunity like that? POST SCRIPT The author is President of Software Tool & Die and has been involved in world-wide computer networking and the internet for over a decade. Software Tool & Die is the point of presence for Alternet in New England. Alternet is a commercial internet vendor and was a founding member of the CIX. Software Tool & Die also runs The World (world.std.com), a public access Unix site attached to the internet providing electronic mail, news and information services to the general public - -------------------- Copyright, 1992, Barry Shein, Software Tool & Die. Duplication rights granted to all so long as copies are unmodified and not sold (other than duplication or information access costs.)