N-1-3-010-10, "Internet and NSFNET's Evolution", by Eric M. Aupperle, For more than two years NSFNET's future has been hotly debated in numerous forums and by many interest groups. A major factor for this increased interest is the rapid international growth of TCP/IP networking resulting from NSFNET's success. The emerging market for Internet networking is now of intense interest to many potential vendors of services and products. Some sense of this growing market can be seen in a recent report by The Insight Research Corp., which predicted that the world-wide revenues for internetworking would triple from $976.3 million in 1992 to $2.8 billion in 1996. In addition, the current cooperative agreement for NSFNET backbone services is scheduled to end creating the potential for new and different models for the future NSFNET. The market aspects of the Internet are not a new concept. The terms "privatization" and "commercialization" were coined during the first of two 1990 Harvard workshops. Policy questions in the changing environment abound, such as those relating to NSFNET's focus on high-bandwidth scientific users verses ubiquitous access for the K-12 and library communities, or the appropriateness of Acceptable Use Policies. One focus of the collective debate on issues is NSF's next NSFNET solicitation. An illustration of the increasing telecommunications industry activity in the Internet is the recent announcement by DoE and NASA of vendors selected to upgrade their respective networking infrastructures. With their Federal High Performance Computing and Communication program funding, DoE and NASA chose to upgrade three of their networks using ATM "cell" based technology provided by Sprint. Three other companies will work with Sprint on this project; they are TRW, Cisco and Digital Equipment Corporation. Separately, Sprint has introduced a new commercial IP service known as SpintLink. The growing interest of the telecommunications industry in the Internet is healthy. This industry has enormous resources and understands that data transport represents a major growth market. A challenge will be how best to couple their resources and experience with both the computer industry's data activity and products, and the many talents of all the organizations which have contributed to the Internet's success to date. Another challenge will be the continued fostering of networking services for the education and research sectors. In part, the NSF's expected structuring of their new NSFNET & NREN solicitation appears to facilitate the further integration of the telecommunications industry into the evolving Internet. The long term outcome of NSF's solicitation as well as the actual implementation of the awarded proposals may well be as significant as NSF's commitment to TCP/IP, and expanding connectivity for the education and research communities were in their 1987 solicitation. Hopefully NSF's stewardship will continue to advance global data networking as successfully as it has for the past five years.