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. Who is to say that my data call is actually connecting to the Internet?

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 would say an intential lack of foresight in order to increase charges for higher profits.