The Internet Thruway, IMHO, is the first serious attempt at getting to the root problem. I don't know much about Nortel's product, but I do know that using the PSTN seems to be the wrong way to get Internet service. Why on earth do you want to use a circuit-switched network to access a packet switched network? That's nuts, but unfortunately it's the only option Joe Consumer has. Cable modems? They'll be great when your cable company's plant will work birectionally and they get their data act together. I was amused by a letter to the editor in this week's _Fortune_ magazine. The writer proudly proclaimed that Internet access over cable worked wonderfully. He went on about how "..on the appointed day, at the appointed time, two cable installers, three Comcast personnel, and two CompUSA personnel arrived and successfully installed my cable modem in two hours..." Good God, if it takes 14 person-hours to install a cable modem, the cable companies are going to lose their shirts! (I'd like to know if this crew was even able to all show up in the same vehicle! :-) As for ADSL, I have serious doubts as to whether or not the phone campanies understand what to do with the technology. After they get xDSL local loops to everyone's home, will they know what to hook them up to? I've heard a lot about ADSL trials, but what are these loops being connected to? Does the solution scale? There are lots folks in the phone company who have no clue as to how the Internet works. This is why none of them saw this Internet access thing coming. (Not that I'm sure they could have done anything about it...) They now have a network that is underengineered for the way it's being used and they have to do something about it quick... The only means they know of is to raise the price. The Internet Thruway product has potential to help solve their problems, but I'm afraid that it may flop because it'll require too much cooperation between the telcos and the ISPs. After all, the telco nework was just fine until all of these ISPs showed up and screwed it up. You can be damn sure that most of the telco folks don't see it as thier problem to pay to solve this congestion in their network. Many still feel it's the telcos' God-given right to make a profit every quarter, regardless of how poorly they project future customer demand. I'm afraid that they're going to see Internet Thruway as an opportunity to charge ISPs for the privledge of helping to relieve the congestion in the PSTN... It all comes down to paying for more facilities, whether it's Internet Thruway, bigger switches and more trunks, or a parallel (ADSL-based perhaps) packet-switched network. The telcos won't make ubiquitous Internet connectivity happen for free. For that matter, nor would the ISPs if they were in the telcos' position... The fundamental problem is that until now, Internet users have been able to take advantage of "slack" resources in the PSTN at little or no additional cost. Now that these resources are drying up, no one (users, ISPs, telcos) wants to foot the bill for more. --zawada At 05:28 PM 1/31/97 -0800, Bharat Ranjan wrote:

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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?

Check out a product called 'Internet Thruway" that routes a call based on the Called Number. The idea is for telcos to implement this product as a back-end to their access network so calls being made to a Thruway provider never reach the voice network. It is instead sent (via IP and L2F) directly to the ISP's network. SBC is already committed to deploying this in parts of Texas.

Paul J. Zawada, RCDD | Senior Network Engineer zawada@ncsa.uiuc.edu | National Center for Supercomputing Applications +1 217 244 4728 | http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/People/zawada