Internet vs. Telephone company
An interesting article was posted by the Seattle Times yesterday, it's at: http://www.seattletimes.com/topstories/browse/html97/inet_013097.html This was the Jan 30, 1997 issue. In it, Diedtra Henderson writes: "US West serves 2.2 million customers in Washington state and spent $340 million improving its phone system here last year, a spokesman said. The company blames a meteoric rise in Internet use for its phone-service woes. [SNIP] "For the next five years we are in big trouble. There is no clear, intelligent way to expand the phone system to handle the Internet demands," said Lu, who expects metered Internet access in the future - in other words, you pay by the hour. " 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? Also do people agree with the claims that our local lack of available phone lines is due to Internet usage or just to lack of foresight in growth management decisions? Tony Torzillo ---------------------------------------------------------------- Network Specialist, UW Network Operations Center, 543-5128 EMAIL: ndc-noc@cac.washington.edu, torzillo@cac.washington.edu ----------------------------------------------------------------
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?
Old stuff... They're always trying to push special modem lines off on folks.
Also do people agree with the claims that our local lack of available phone lines is due to Internet usage or just to lack of foresight in growth management decisions?
half and half. The telecommunications infrastructure was designed to service X number of people with exactly 15% of the phones being off hook at any given time. i think we can all agree that net calls are up longer than perhaps 95% of voice calls. Each of these calls occupies a path from the customer's CO to the provider's CO. The provider's CO has to have this monstrouc hunt group programmed in their switch. This switch has to have enough paths to support this group. Honestly.. before internet stuff became big business, whoever heard of a 900 line hunt group? One thing to note is that there are dozens of CO's in each of the larger cities and one or more switches in each CO with millions of pairs of copper and fiber all around. Upgrading the infrastructure to support this new demand is NOT going to be easy and it's NOT gonna be cheap... which means it ain't gonna happen soon enough. Afterall, ISDN just (in the last year or so) really began to take off.. it was being sold as many as 10 years ago. Ameritech is advertizing ADSL on their web page now even. (Not sure where thats gonna go though.) With new technology comes new services, what cool new things are gonna happen before this major upgrade can happen that are gonna throw the whole thing outta whack? Its a touch time to be a telco.. -Wayne
An interesting article was posted by the Seattle Times yesterday, it's at: http://www.seattletimes.com/topstories/browse/html97/inet_013097.html This was the Jan 30, 1997 issue. In it, Diedtra Henderson writes:
"US West serves 2.2 million customers in Washington state and spent >$340 million improving its phone system here last year, a spokesman said. >The company blames a meteoric rise in Internet use for its phone-service woes. [SNIP] "For the next five years we are in big trouble. There is no clear, intelligent way to expand the phone system to handle the Internet demands," said Lu, who expects metered Internet access in the future >- in other words, you pay by the hour. "
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?
Also do people agree with the claims that our local lack of >available phone lines is due to Internet usage or just to lack of foresight in growth management decisions?
I think we're missing the point. They aren't just going to charge hourly for data service, but for all service. It really wasn't that long ago they were doing this (US West stopped in the late 70's or early 80's All they are going to need to do is notify customers and turn the old billing procedures back on, they already track hourly usage anyway.
Tony Torzillo ---------------------------------------------------------------- Network Specialist, UW Network Operations Center, 543-5128 EMAIL: ndc-noc@cac.washington.edu, torzillo@cac.washington.edu ----------------------------------------------------------------
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.
Some context from Washington State: US West has recently been rebuffed in efforts before the Washington State legislature and our regulatory body, the WUTC (Washington Utilities and Telecommunications Commission). The request for an hourly rate is probably nothing more than a PR effort taking advantage of recent publicity about internet jams, a la AOL, etc. Given their recent failures here the effect of this publicity is much more likely to be through another RBOC citing the consideration of the policy here. That aside, infrastructure investment considerations are a valid subject and it would behoove those of us vested in this whole field to get a better handle on these numbers. (If not the infrastructure itself!) -DT
participants (5)
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Daryn D. Fisher -
Doug Tooley -
shields＠crosslink.net -
Tony Torzillo -
Wayne Bouchard