On LECs attacking ISPs, it is interesting to note that several medium-sized ISPs in Maryland which have over 100 phone lines are now getting them delivered by fiber direct to the ISP. This is nothing new - what is news is that some of these fiber setups use a form of SLC-96 systems which are incapable of carrying data traffic over 21 kbps with modern 28.8 kbps modems. Nobody new what the problem was for a long time, until finally Bell Atlantic admitted that there were some bandwidth limitations in some SLC-96 setups. They went on to note that the tarrif required them to carry only acceptable voice and 4800 bps communication, nothing more, and that these ISPs were basically stuck with substandard lines. The ISPs involved are now looking into alternative local dialtone, but it is few and far between. Bell Atlantic is looking to get into the Internet business...perhaps they will engineer their own dialups properly, while giving low-data-rate fiber connections to ISPs? And on the radio-last-mile service, I used to be enthusiastic about it, but I am no more. It is pretty impractical to discuss VHF or UHF frequencies for real net connectivity, there just isn't enough bandwidth to be practical. 900 MHz and higher appear to be the best solution, using CDMA spread-spectrum in a microcellular environment. Metricom (http://www.metricom.com) has CDMA microcellular modems which get 14.4 kbps equivalent throughput in the 900 MHz region, and they have a large microcellular network already set up in the Bay Area with Internet connectivity. Once 2 GHz technology becomes cheap enough (that's GaAs chips instead of Si), I can imagine wide-scale 56kbps service over microcellular networks. But how can these things compete with @Home, which is promising 10 Mbps in and 128 kbps out of homes with cable modems? -Thomas Edwards