North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Internet access and telco usage patterns

  • From: Michael Dillon
  • Date: Tue Jul 02 00:37:21 1996

Here is something that I got in a private email message with permission to
quote to the list.

----------begin forwarded segment-----------

It is common knowledge that the local telcos are in a panic.  Call
hold time has increased from the traditional 3 minutes to 10 minutes
in the last 2 years.  The effect is CO class 5 switch capacity is
bursting at the seams, but even worse is the intra-office trunks are
maxed out.  The cost of adding more trunks has them looking for something
cheaper.  None of the traditional traffic engineering works anymore - HA!
What's even better is this comes at a time when they are all wanting to
screw the local business and invest in long distance.

----------end forwarded segment-----------

I should mention that another incident that happened in Vancouver was that
BC Tel called up one of the larger Internet Providers on a Friday before
the long weekend and said "Your lines are being shut off today. Your only
option is to relocate to a particular suburb and we will transfer them
there for you". The reason for this action was that dialup users to the
ISP had completely used up the inter-office trunks in one of the business
districts which at times was causing *EVERYBODY* in the area to get 
"no dialtone at all" when they picked up the phone. You couldn't even dial
911 which was the thing that prodded the telco into such drastic action.
Imagine the lawsuits in the case of someone maimed or killed due to
inability to phone for assistance!

When we discussed some of these things last year on can.infohighway I
pointed out that if they could divide the traffic by type that they could
get better trunk utilization by running IP between the CO's. This is the
modem in every switch location scenario. Additionally, if they segregate
voice traffic they could use compression technology to get as much as 4
times the conversations on a trunk. Gandalf makes boxes that will run 4
voice lines down a digital DS0 circuit and the quality is very good. You
can tell there is compression there but it's better than long distance
line quality often is.

I know that the end-user connection has in the past been considered the
domain of the ISP, not the NSP, but when you look at the traffic
engineering issues and the deregulation of local loop, I still see some
sort of role here for the larger telco-type organizations (and I include
ANS, UUNET, et al. as potentially in this group). There is no doubt that
the ISP can provide better customer support and training and that the ISP
can do a better job of running the servers for the most part (news being a
sometime exception). However, I can still see room here for NSP's to step
into local loop without damaging the ISP part of the industry. 

Ford makes cars, ships cars to car lots, maintains spare parts
inventories, trains mechanics and sales people, and yet it still makes
sense to have a local business running the Ford dealership. Similar
analogy applies here I think.

Michael Dillon                                   ISP & Internet Consulting
Memra Software Inc.                                 Fax: +1-604-546-3049
http://www.memra.com                             E-mail: [email protected]

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