At 10:47 PM 10/26/96 -0500, Roger Williams <roger@coelacanth.com> wrote:

I caught an interview on the BBC last night with a representative from PacBell, who claimed that this subsidy resulted in ISPs actively discouraging customers from using data service (ISDN) instead of POTS.

For those of you not in PacBell territory, PacBell really misunderstood the Internet access market when they set their current rates. ISDN costs $X/month (about 2-3 x POTS) plus (daytime) per-minute charges of 4 cents, (nighttime 7pm-7am) free. (This probably requires that your ISP have Centrex access in your local calling area.) What they didn't realize was that computer people think "It's free at night" means "It's free at night", so they dial up and stay on. (Many of us non-ISDN users do the same with POTS, of course.) ISDN call setup times are fast enough that it's possible to do IP support that tears down calls after X seconds of non-use and sets them up again when there's traffic, which is practical since you don't have 30 seconds of modem retraining time per setup. If PacBell's really bugged enough about usage patterns, they could go write a good Winsock package to support it themselves and give it away free to ISDN customers.... # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com # You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk Imagine if three million people voted for somebody they _knew_, and the politicians had to count them all.