The field trial of regional community network in Hayashi company houses

Abstract

Residential use of computer communication is a major topic in current computer and telecommunication research, and it is important to design a network platform which is capable of supporting residential users. As one such platform, we discuss the regional community network system. Employing fiber-optic subscriber lines, it provides a cost-effective LAN-like environment to regional community members. We assume that this system will become the basic access platform for residential users' computer communications in the near future. After completing our basic study and design, we started field testing this network system using about 180 families at NTT company houses located in Hayashi, Yokosuka, Japan, in October 1995. We installed optical subscriber lines to each family's home to provide a computer communication environment. The trial has two goals: to prove the feasibility of the system and to determine how residential users apply the network. Though we provided only the basic network infrastructure with virtually no information content, trial participants quickly learnt to post messages and to make their own contents on the network. This trial is scheduled to continue until 1998. This paper is an interim report and shows how the participants used the regional community network in the first year of the trial.