[141759] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Yup; the Internet is screwed up.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Chris Adams)
Sat Jun 11 01:55:48 2011
Date: Sat, 11 Jun 2011 00:54:48 -0500
From: Chris Adams <cmadams@hiwaay.net>
To: NANOG list <nanog@nanog.org>
Mail-Followup-To: Chris Adams <cmadams@hiwaay.net>,
NANOG list <nanog@nanog.org>
In-Reply-To: <4DF2AC2B.7070108@mompl.net>
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Once upon a time, Jeroen van Aart <jeroen@mompl.net> said:
> I wonder, what's wrong with dialup through ISDN? You get speed that is
> about the same as low end broadband I'd say. And I think it'd be
> available at these locations where DSL is not.
For the most part, it probably isn't, especially now. Telco front-line
support doesn't even know what a BRI is anymore. While POTS lines are
largely flat-rate for local access in the US, many telcos put per-minute
charges on ISDN BRIs (and that's per-channel-minute, so 128k runs mintes
at 2x wall clock time), so the "power users" that wanted
higher-than-dialup speeds didn't move to ISDN very fast (because they
also wanted to be on line nearly 24x7).
Also, the telcos generally made getting a BRI difficult to impossible.
An early string of Dilbert cartoons covered Dilbert's attempts to get
ISDN at his house, and IIRC they were based on Scott Adams' real-life
attempts (and this was either when or shortly after he worked for the
phone company).
I live in Huntsville, AL, and we supposedly were one of the first cities
in BellSouth territory (if not the US) to have ISDN available at
essentially every address. After a while, it usually wasn't too painful
to get a BRI turned up, as long as you didn't want any special configs
(such as hunting); when I got mine, it pretty much "just worked".
However, the billing was confusing at best; IIRC in the several years I
had ISDN service, my bill was never exactly the same amount two
consecutive months (and I never had any usage charges, so it wasn't
because of that).
--
Chris Adams <cmadams@hiwaay.net>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.
