On Mon, 1 Jul 1996 18:12:27 -0700 (PDT) Michael Dillon wrote:

Has anybody looked at the practicality of installing modem pools in each telco switch location to grab the dialup user's traffic at the IP level and then route it to their ISP of choice for authentication and further routing. In other words, an ISP wouldn't buy phone lines, modems and terminal servers, they would buy IP access ports.

The PTT in Israel tried doing something like this for a period of a month before the government shut them down but they are planning on reopening soon. A user dials the number 135 and gets connected to a Cisco t/s in his area. One message unit per 5 minutes directly on the customers phone bill. No authentication, no userid. The PTT stated that the ISPs can sell services to the end user, such email boxes, Usenet access, proxy services, etc. The PTT would run no server - just pure IP level access. The one hitch that was discovered was that hackers loved the system since they did not have to identify themselves at an IP level. Israeli CERT teams got lots of complaints from foreign systems about cracking attempts from the PTTs dialup users. Since their phone systems and IP systems were seperate, there was no handoff of the dialing phone number to the t/s for recording as a traceback. They are now trying to reengineer the system so as to have that capability. Anyone designing such a system should take that into account.

Michael Dillon ISP & Internet Consulting Memra Software Inc. Fax: +1-604-546-3049 http://www.memra.com E-mail: michael@memra.com

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