NMIS Project Final Report 1993 - 1997

1.1 Background

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When the NMIS Project was initiated in 1993, the emerging U.S. National Information Infrastructure (NII) vision was to provide ubiquitous access to multimedia information services with broad social and economic benefits beyond the scientific and research community. The networked delivery of a combination of audio, video, graphics and text was expected to help achieve goals such as improving lifelong continuing education for workers in fast-moving scientific and technical fields, providing more effective and equitable opportunities in K-12 education, and increasing access to information for health-care workers. The NII's success, and particularly federal investments in network infrastructure, was expected to be evaluated on the basis of benefits such as contributions to improved K-12 achievement scores, industrial competitiveness indicators and infant mortality rates rather than traditional technical measures such as bandwidth, packets/month, access lines and registered networks.

It was also relatively clear to knowledgeable observers in the early 1990s that an array of complex technical and policy obstacles stood in the way of creating and delivering multimedia information services over the existing network infrastructure. Service providers would be faced with artificially high costs because the infrastructure for reaching sectors of the end-user population varied widely between and within the cable, telephony, and data networking industries. Furthermore, although new network, display, compression and storage technologies were being developed, the system level technical requirements for nation-wide service delivery were not well understood. Changes in scale (the growing number of multimedia users) and network requirements (the large bandwidth that multimedia applications require) were going to create the need for huge increases in infrastructure requirements. Finally, many network research activities at that time had not considered critical policy and standards issues which could severely impair the growth of networked multimedia services.

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