A couple observations: 1. Local and Long Distance phone companies stand to gain the most from the current Internet growth frenzy, yet seem to be the quickest to try to slow or defer its growth...They have the luxury of having enough a buaracracy surrounding them to play both ends AND the middle. One cannot say that they haven't profited from their growth....re-investment in infrastructure is simply par for the course when providing network services. 2. If they are NOT careful, TCI/@Home will have their lunch. Although ADSL may be viable, its cost model still looks high to the consumer when positioned against cable modems, and would offer no real tangible difference to the casual end user. My wish is that they begin to understand this at a macro level....

---------- From: Tony Torzillo[SMTP:torzillo@cac.washington.edu] Sent: Friday, January 31, 1997 4:24 PM To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: 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 ----------------------------------------------------------------