ISDN modems were available in retail stores. Anything above v.34bis (ex: v.92, digital lines), required hardware, provisioning, and billing, at the CO. v.34bis and below simply used the available analog voice bandwidth (POTS), telcos resented that because the tech was popular and outside their control, but they did get to sell a lot more voice lines... dialup BBS and Internet. See... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hush-A-Phone_Corp._v._United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carterfone ISDN was also fun for... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caller_ID_spoofing Telcos *still* ban and resent what their users want to do. Which means some chance at profit still exists for startups building their own neighborhood, local, regional, etc fiber and wifi networks.

This was probably due to mechanical (Strowger, Crossbar) mechanical switches.    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossbar_switch     ×  These had a very limited ability to make connections; only a small proportion of telephones on a given switch could call each other at a given time.   I believe these were called "blocking switches".   These things, called "switches", often had the ability to connect to 10,000 subscriber loops.Later, electronic telephone switches allowed more extensive connections.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_switching_system   ×The big problem is, these switches might have been replaced only after decades of use.  It probably didn't take all that many long-term (modem) connections to use up a mechanical switch's connection ability.                 Jim Bell On Thursday, December 27, 2018, 4:07:24 AM PST, P.J. Westerhof wrote: Correct. If memory serves me right, not only because some modems caused technical issues with installed telephone infrastructure. But also because the then customary flat rate for local telephone use meant that you could get on the Internet almost indefinitely if an Internet access point was within reach, f.i. university or library. This extra and sustained load could cause technical issues in itself, but it also cost the phone companies a pretty penny in lost income. No wonder the phone companies were quick to change their tariffs to usage based. Gr. Peter ____________________________________________________________ Op 26-12-18 om 23:21 schreef jim bell:

I think there was a time in the late 1970's when phone companies expressed resentment that their users were employing modems on their phone lines.

On Thu, 27 Dec 2018 13:11:31 +0100 "P.J. Westerhof" wrote:

Correct. If memory serves me right, not only because some modems caused technical issues with installed telephone infrastructure. But also because the then customary flat rate for local telephone use

there was no flat rate here. the phone company was a state monopoly then turned into a 'free market' 'private' government chartered monopoly. I think they were pleased wtih people using modems and paying their extortionary prices.

meant that you could get on the Internet almost indefinitely if an Internet access point was within reach, f.i. university or library. This extra and sustained load could cause technical issues in itself, but it also cost the phone companies a pretty penny in lost income. No wonder the phone companies were quick to change their tariffs to usage based.

Hardly surprising.

Gr. Peter ____________________________________________________________

Op 26-12-18 om 23:21 schreef jim bell:

...

I think there was a time in the late 1970's when phone companies expressed resentment that their users were employing modems on their phone lines.

On Thursday, December 27, 2018, 2:10:02 PM PST, Zenaan Harkness wrote:

...

Op 26-12-18 om 23:21 schreef jim bell:

...

I think there was a time in the late 1970's when phone companies expressed resentment that their users were employing modems on their phone lines.

On Thu, Dec 27, 2018 at 04:37:01PM -0300, Juan wrote:

...

...

meant that you could get on the Internet almost indefinitely if an Internet access point was within reach, f.i. university or library. This extra and sustained load could cause technical issues in itself, but it also cost the phone companies a pretty penny in lost income. No wonder the phone companies were quick to change their tariffs to usage based.

...

    Hardly surprising.

Re "it also cost the phone companies a pretty penny in lost income":

This is an example of insidiously successful 'thought control' or effective/de-facto control of our conversation.

Generally, I agree.  However, I should point out that if (then-existing) telephone switches were 'blocking', meaning not allowing essentially complete simultaneous connectivity,  such connectivity becomes a limited commodity that tends to have to be divvied out, perhaps by price.  That probably didn't happen in most of America, because phone service contracts tended to be a fixed monthly cost, rather than in proportion to monthly usage.  Both the 1ESS and the 1AESS were 'blocking'.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_One_Electronic_Switching_System     They didn't allow all phone circuits to be active at one time.   ×As that article states,  "Most of the thousands of 1ESS and 1AESS offices in the USA were replaced in the 1990s by DMS-100, 5ESS Switch and other digital switches, and since 2010 also by packet switches. As of late 2014, just over 20 1AESS installations remained in the North American network, which were located mostly in AT&T's legacy BellSouth and AT&T's legacy Southwestern Bell states, especially in the Atlanta GA metro area, the Saint Louis MO metro area, and in the Dallas/Fort Worth TX metro area. In 2015, AT&T did not renew a support contract with Alcatel-Lucent (now Nokia) for the 1AESS systems still in operation and notified Alcatel-Lucent of its intent to remove them all from service by 2017. As a result, Alcatel-Lucent dismantled the last 1AESS lab at the Naperville Bell Labs location in 2015, and announced the discontinuation of support for the 1AESS.[7] In 2017, AT&T completed the removal of remaining 1AESS systems by moving customers to other newer technology switches, typically with Genband switches with TDM trunking only.The last known 1AESS switch was in Odessa, TX (Odessa Lincoln Federal wirecenter ODSSTXLI). It was disconnected from service around June 3, 2017 and cut over to a Genband G5/G6 packet switch."[quote ends] I don't know the statistics, but I'd imagine that modem usage in the 1970's was so insignificant to not cause a problem.  The 1980's was a decade where there was increasing computer bulletin-board system usage.  But, by the early-to-mid 1990's, heavy usage of modems on POTS (Plain Old Telephone System) lines occurred.  This made necessary the changeover described in the paragraph above.  

https://www.cs.umb.edu/~emm/crackdown/ http://www.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker_Crackdown The Hacker Crackdown Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier by Bruce Sterling Part 1: Crashing The System " In the meantime, however, police and corporate security maintained their own suspicions about "the chances of recurrence" and the real reason why a "problem of this magnitude" had appeared, seemingly out of nowhere. Police and security knew for a fact that hackers of unprecedented sophistication were illegally entering, and reprogramming, certain digital switching stations. Rumors of hidden "viruses" and secret "logic bombs" in the switches ran rampant in the underground, with much chortling over AT&T's predicament, and idle speculation over what unsung hacker genius was responsible for it. Some hackers, including police informants, were trying hard to finger one another as the true culprits of the Crash. Telco people found little comfort in objectivity when they contemplated these possibilities. It was just too close to the bone for them; it was embarrassing; it hurt so much, it was hard even to talk about. There has always been thieving and misbehavior in the phone system. There has always been trouble with the rival independents, and in the local loops. But to have such trouble in the core of the system, the long-distance switching stations, is a horrifying affair. To telco people, this is all the difference between finding roaches in your kitchen and big horrid sewer-rats in your bedroom. ... As more and more switches did have that bit of bad luck and collapsed, the call-traffic became more and more densely packed in the remaining switches, which were groaning to keep up with the load. And of course, as the calls became more densely packed, the switches were much more likely to be hit twice within a hundredth of a second. It only took four seconds for a switch to get well. There was no physical damage of any kind to the switches, after all. Physically, they were working perfectly. This situation was "only" a software problem. But the 4ESS switches were leaping up and down every four to six seconds, in a virulent spreading wave all over America, in utter, manic, mechanical stupidity. They kept knocking one another down with their contagious "OK" messages. It took about ten minutes for the chain reaction to cripple the network. Even then, switches would periodically luck-out and manage to resume their normal work. Many calls -- millions of them -- were managing to get through. But millions weren't. ... On Tuesday, September 17, 1991, came the most spectacular outage yet. This case had nothing to do with software failures -- at least, not directly. Instead, a group of AT&T's switching stations in New York City had simply run out of electrical power and shut down cold. Their back-up batteries had failed. Automatic warning systems were supposed to warn of the loss of battery power, but those automatic systems had failed as well. This time, Kennedy, La Guardia, and Newark airports all had their voice and data communications cut. This horrifying event was particularly ironic, as attacks on airport computers by hackers had long been a standard nightmare scenario, much trumpeted by computer- security experts who feared the computer underground. There had even been a Hollywood thriller about sinister hackers ruining airport computers -- Die Hard II. Now AT&T itself had crippled airports with computer malfunctions -- not just one airport, but three at once, some of the busiest in the world. By 1991 the System's defenders had met their nebulous Enemy, and the Enemy was -- the System. " https://www.nytimes.com/1990/01/16/us/experts-diagnose-telephone-crash.html https://users.csc.calpoly.edu/~jdalbey/SWE/Papers/att_collapse.html http://www.phworld.org/history/attcrash.htm The Risks Digest - Volume 9, Issue 62 - February 26, 1990. Cause of AT&T network failure "Peter G. Neumann" Fri, 26 Jan 90 14:24:30 PST

From Telephony, Jan 22, 1990 p11: The Crash of the AT&T Network in 1990 ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_System_No._7 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5928168/stupid-mistakes-in-c-break-switc... If you paid serious attention to every rumor out and about these hacker kids, you would hear all kinds of wacko saucer-nut nonsense: that the National Security Agency monitored all American phone calls, that the CIA and DEA tracked traffic on bulletin-boards with word-analysis programs … — Chapter 2, The Digital Underground Cypherpunks... such nonsense they are.

On 12/27/18, P.J. Westerhof wrote:

some modems caused technical issues with installed telephone infrastructure.

There were power level regulations in modem standards. Sure maybe some linecards weren't well designed and protected, or the switch was buggy, etc.

customery flat rate for local telephone use meant that you could get on the Internet almost indefinitely if an Internet access point was within reach, f.i. university or library.

Fun to dial out from their own modem banks once on their terminals... and so the daisy chain went, around the world.

wonder the phone companies were quick to change their tariffs to usage based.

Similarly BBS's and ISP's didn't like you tacking up all their circuits 24x7, "nobody else could get on", so they had kick timers, fees, even bans. Today's ethernet packet switching just gets slow and droppy instead. Now people can emulate some of the old modem hardware, and software boards and games that got preserved and opensourced ported or cloned, over SSH over and within encrypted anonymous overlay networks for fun. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_Bell https://github.com/wwivbbs/wwiv

On Thursday, December 27, 2018, 7:29:29 AM PST, John Newman wrote: On Wed, Dec 26, 2018 at 10:21:56PM +0000, jim bell wrote:

...

  In the late 1970's, there was a technology in development called "ISDN",  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Services_Digital_Network  (Although, you wouldn't know this from this WIkipedia article, which merely makes reference to a 1988 standard.)    During the 1970's, I was reading the magazines Electronics, and EDN (Electronics Design News), and others, and there were articles and ads for ISDN chips.  Keep in mind that during the 1970's, commonly-available modems worked at speeds of 300 bits/second and 1200 bits/second.  If ISDN had actually been delivered promptly, it would have leapfrogged the 9600, 14.4kbps, 28.8 kbps, and higher speeds.  However, ISDN was probably developed on the Phone Companys' calendar, very slowly, while the rest of electronics (including modems) were operating on a much-faster time frame. × The ISDN idea was that a telephone line would have quantity 2, 64 kilobits/second channels, as well as a 16 kilobit/second channel.   However, one additional good reason that ISDN didn't succeed was simple:  The phone companies would certainly have charged a high per-month fee for ISDN lin es.  (And such a service would have had a box, analogous to a 'modem', into which your computer would have connected.)  The eventual alternative, buying the modems which eventually appeared on the market, was comparatively free.  I think there was a time in the late 1970's when phone companies expressed resentment that their users were employing modems on their phone lines.     >                   Jim Bell

The phone companies not only expressed resentment, it was in fact "illegal" to connect anything not made/sold by Bell directly to the phone system. This is at least part of the reason that early modems were "acoustic couplers" (like the modem used in the movie WarGames).

 Something just now occurred to me!  In that movie, WarGames, the technique later called "wardialling" was used, dialling up sequential phone numbers to identify modems.   But, the modem in that movie was shown to be an acoustic-coupled one.  I don't know if acoustic-couplers were capable of dialling, automatically.  They shouldn't have been, unless somebody added a circuit which allowed quick connects and disconnects to be made, probably using some kind of mechanical relay. However, by 1983 (the year of that movie) connecting to telephone lines was legal.  See the Carterphone decision.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carterfone https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/carterfone-40-years/ ×                          Jim Bell