[ale] Re:ISDN and BellSouth

[Byron A Jeff]

> 
> 
> Have I missed something?  How many people are using a dedicated ISDN
> service?  The last time I checked, it was well beyond affordable to 
> even get an ISP to furnish me a dedicated ISDN connection.  

That's true. But that's simply an economy of scale issue. Since there
aren't a lot of customers for dedicated connections yet with ISDN,
the cost is high. When if gets popular, the price will drop.

I've seen quotes for dedicated 128K connections at $400/month.

> 
> Don't get me wrong, I'm against this gouging, but in truth I'll bet
> that most people with ISDN service aren't using it 100% and use 
> far less than the 200 hours.  Businesses, of course, may use more
> but I've never used anywhere near 200 hours of connect time in a
> month myself.

Well an interesting thing happened at my house. Once the net (The web in
particular) became instantly available (I installed diald for on demand
dialing) my wife and son started using the web on a regular basis.

This leads me to believe that a dedicated connection could be a useful thing.

Of couse ISDN has advantages like 1 second dialing, which will really help.

Another thing about a dedicated connection is that the machine is reachable
from the net. Most ISP's don't have incoming dialouts to client's machines.
There have been several occasions where I've been happy to be able to reach my
home machine while I'm at work.

> 
> Did I miss something?

ISDN gives a somewhat decent data path to far reaching machines. It affords
the opportunity for having home server and accessibilty from the net. It's
the advantage of having bandwith that real bits can go on instead of the
simulated analog of Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS)

But the most potent argument against metering is simply the fact that POTS
are not metered. a 24/7 POTS line occupies exactly the same bandwith as
a 64K ISDN connection. And in fact the POTS occupies more resources because
of the digitization of the signal at the CO right?

ISDN allure is the higher bandwith digital connection. It defeats the purpose
to limit the connect time.

I hope to be at the PSC meeting on Monday.

BAJ