Hi there folx,

...

...

From the 'For What Its Worth' Department.

- paul

BELL VS. INTERNET PROVIDERS Bell Canada plants to increase line rate charges for Internet service providers by as much as 400%, saying the higher charge is necessary because those providers use lines for 55 to 60 minutes every hour compared with voice usage on a Centrex line of about 10 minutes. The service providers say the move aims to eliminate competition for Bell when it introduces its Worldlinx Internet access by the end of this year. (Montreal Gazette 9 Nov 95 D7)

The same outrages story is going on in Russia ... they're trying to force ppl. with modems pay 2-5 times more for the telephone service. Scumbugs even designed devices to listen periodically to the random lines in the TelCo COs , trying to get a modem carrier. And if they find one , they put some kind of filter on that line which makes impossible to use the modem - till you pay the dough

I think that it is the point in certain other countries with state/one company monopoly in communications.

Rashid

Now wait a second, guys, you are right that it is not nice in and of itself, but it is nevertheless understandable. Different from the Internet, the phone companies do extensive network analysis, and base their optimization and capacity functions on the results (needless to say, their (individual) systems are also a little bit bigger than those (individual NSP) Internet toys, and analysis and capacity planning may be a bit more important there). This includes knowing what the profile of typical phone calls is (frequency, duration, ...). In the US the local calls are typically free, but with a modem you hog switches potentially forever. I have used the same voice line with a modem, clearly traversing phone company switches, for weeks at a time. It does have an impact on capacity planning. I am not saying the phone companies are right or wrong, just that we are clearly talking about different workload profiles, which may not be coverable in their "free local calls" budget. No, I would still not like it either if they would charge me more for modem access than for voice. May be similar to the introduction of multimedia into the Internet. You guys treat all the same, but sooner or later you will be caught by that with your pants down. E.g., in a heavy traffic aggregation environment we see, say, 80,000 simulteneous transactions, perhaps half of them in number of transactions and volume being web traffic. So, may be 50% of 80,000 causing 50% of the traffic (numbers not quite accurate, just to make a point). Now you see, say, 2% of your traffic caused by CU-SeeMe. No problem, right? But that up'n'coming multimedia stuff was may be caused by only 16 transactions. Would not you better worry, just like the phone companies about modems? How long can that be sustained, if routine packet losses of 10% on the underprovisioned and uncontrolled infrastructure are already declared as perfectly acceptable?

no, they have simply identified someone whom they think has no alternative to just bleeding more. Ah, the perks of the monarchy.

the story i heard was not about usage percentage by time, but rather usage percentage by bandwidth. modems squeeze every possible transition out of the 3KHz band, while voice calls have few tones and much silence. this means a modem call takes more bandwidth out of the inter-CO trunks and LD aggregates. the telco's don't use strict DS0a TDM internally. the only reason why usage percentage by time matters to a telco is to differentiate between the economic impact of G3 FAX vs. V.32bis modems: they both use all of the link's transitions but FAXes are usually short lived and so there's nothing to worry about. i'm not happy about the trend toward detecting modem users and charging more for them, but it's an inevitable technical/economic necessity and that means the PUCs around the united states are all going to have to let it happen. what's amazed me for the last few years is that it's taken the telcos so long to realize what they need to do and do it.

Unfortunately, illogical tariffs often make this not true for the ISP.

Delivering dialtone over a T1 is certainly more cost effective than paying a %400 increase for Centrex lines.