Thus spake "Niels Bakker" <niels=nanog@bakker.net>
* jeffshultz@wvi.com (Jeff Shultz) [Fri 18 Jun 2004, 21:42 CEST]:
Pay for it? If I remember from CALEA, the providers pay for it (and eventually their customers), and as for "broadband Internet providers"... I'm guessing anyone who offers end user customers a circuit bigger than 53.333k.
Pet peeve: broadband isn't a synonym for "faster than a modem." Cable and DSL are broadband due to those technologies using a wide range of frequencies. Ethernet is not broadband (but baseband).
Congress can define a word (in the US legal context) to mean anything they want; whether such has any relation to its technical definition is irrelevant. I doubt they care about the technology used to deliver IP service, only the capabilities and typical users; defining "broadband" as any circuit 56kbps or above would likely suffice for their intent, regardless of how incorrect it is. However, I fail to see how "broadband" or link speeds in general even matter in this context; what matters is whether the link is of sufficient speed for VoIP to be feasible, in which case anything from 9.6kbps cellular to WiFi, from ARCnet to OC192/10GE might qualify -- or might not, if IP isn't running over it. S Stephen Sprunk "Those people who think they know everything CCIE #3723 are a great annoyance to those of us who do." K5SSS --Isaac Asimov