From: Eric Murray <ericm@lne.com>
Date: Wed, 18 Sep 1996 06:33:56 +0800
To: stewarts@ix.netcom.com (Bill Stewart)
Subject: Re: 56 kbps modems
In-Reply-To: <199609170721.AAA22844@dfw-ix12.ix.netcom.com>
Message-ID: <199609171741.KAA19827@slack.lne.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Bill Stewart writes:
> 
> >On Mon, 16 Sep 1996, Jay Gairson wrote:
> >> Speaking of ISDN, how many people, can afford to have a personal ISDN 
> >> line in there house?  And then afford to connect to something/someone 
> >> else on a next to permanent basis monthly?
> 
> It's Phone Company Dependent.  Here in Pac Bell territory,
> an ISDN phone line costs about 2.5 analog phone lines,
> and gets you two phone lines plus some signalling.
> Connection costs are free at night, and 1 cent/minute daytime.
> That may change - the phone company is appalled that all these
> computer people interpret the phrase "free at night" as meaning
> "it's _free_ at night", so their holding time predictions were bogus :-)
> Night is defined as 7pm-7am for ISDN.  ISDN-equipped ISPs start at
> about $30/month; don't know if that's unlimited connect time or not.

It's not.  We wanted a 24/7 connection, with ISDN in
PacBellLand that's ~$120/month for the ISDN (Centrex) and
about $300/month for an ISP to route packets.
Regular ISDN (not Centrex) would be even more expensive, and
to do Centrex your ISP has to be in the same CO.  The one ISP
that was in out CO seemed pretty clueless.  Pac Bell
doesn't seem to want us to use ISDN.  We wound up doing
Frame Relay instead.  We pay about the same to
PacBell but less to the ISP.  In addition, since it's
a Business Service, Pac Bell is pretty serious about
fixing it when it breaks- none of this "we'll check it out
in a day or two" like with POTS, they put a tech on
it right away.

As far as affording it goes, since our offices are at "home"
it's just another cost of doing business.

Crypto/security related: how hard is it to hack a Frame Relay
connection?  My impression is that it requires access to
one of the telco's routing computers, which would make it
about equivalent in difficulty to hacking POTS.


-- 
Eric Murray  ericm@lne.com  ericm@motorcycle.com  http://www.lne.com/ericm
PGP keyid:E03F65E5 fingerprint:50 B0 A2 4C 7D 86 FC 03  92 E8 AC E6 7E 27 29 AF