Here is something that I got in a private email message with permission to quote to the list. ----------begin forwarded segment----------- It is common knowledge that the local telcos are in a panic. Call hold time has increased from the traditional 3 minutes to 10 minutes in the last 2 years. The effect is CO class 5 switch capacity is bursting at the seams, but even worse is the intra-office trunks are maxed out. The cost of adding more trunks has them looking for something cheaper. None of the traditional traffic engineering works anymore - HA! What's even better is this comes at a time when they are all wanting to screw the local business and invest in long distance. ----------end forwarded segment----------- I should mention that another incident that happened in Vancouver was that BC Tel called up one of the larger Internet Providers on a Friday before the long weekend and said "Your lines are being shut off today. Your only option is to relocate to a particular suburb and we will transfer them there for you". The reason for this action was that dialup users to the ISP had completely used up the inter-office trunks in one of the business districts which at times was causing *EVERYBODY* in the area to get "no dialtone at all" when they picked up the phone. You couldn't even dial 911 which was the thing that prodded the telco into such drastic action. Imagine the lawsuits in the case of someone maimed or killed due to inability to phone for assistance! When we discussed some of these things last year on can.infohighway I pointed out that if they could divide the traffic by type that they could get better trunk utilization by running IP between the CO's. This is the modem in every switch location scenario. Additionally, if they segregate voice traffic they could use compression technology to get as much as 4 times the conversations on a trunk. Gandalf makes boxes that will run 4 voice lines down a digital DS0 circuit and the quality is very good. You can tell there is compression there but it's better than long distance line quality often is. I know that the end-user connection has in the past been considered the domain of the ISP, not the NSP, but when you look at the traffic engineering issues and the deregulation of local loop, I still see some sort of role here for the larger telco-type organizations (and I include ANS, UUNET, et al. as potentially in this group). There is no doubt that the ISP can provide better customer support and training and that the ISP can do a better job of running the servers for the most part (news being a sometime exception). However, I can still see room here for NSP's to step into local loop without damaging the ISP part of the industry. Ford makes cars, ships cars to car lots, maintains spare parts inventories, trains mechanics and sales people, and yet it still makes sense to have a local business running the Ford dealership. Similar analogy applies here I think. Michael Dillon ISP & Internet Consulting Memra Software Inc. Fax: +1-604-546-3049 http://www.memra.com E-mail: michael@memra.com