My question is: Have other people heard of similar attempts by the telephone companies to have "metered Internet access"? It seems they would need a hardware level signal analyzer on their switching equipment to differentiate between voice/data. Does anyone know by what means such a technology could be implemented? What would be the legal ramifications?
The RBOCs would like to move everyone to metered service for everything. They won't be able to, so instead they would like to move as many people as possible to a metered service. Whether or not there is a real difference between a phone call "to the Internet" and other sorts of phone call, if they can convince the PUCs that there is a difference they can move some portion of the subscriber base to metered services. Or if they can convince the public that they ought to use ISDN and pay a per-minute charge, that will work too. Anything that leads to metering is a win for them, because the billing infrastructure is already there. This ought to be on com-priv. -- Shields, CrossLink.