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- 8-Dec-82 18:10:09-PST,24986;000000000001
- Mail-from: ARPANET site USC-ECLC rcvd at 8-Dec-82 1804-PST
- Date: Wednesday, 8 December 1982 18:01-PST
- From: Jonathan Alan Solomon <JSol at USC-ECLC>
- To: telecom at usc-eclb
- Subject: [KLH: Long debate on ZUM]
- Phase-Of-The-Moon: LQ+1D.5H.22M.2S.
-
- Date: Wednesday, 8 December 1982 15:10-PST
- From: Ken Harrenstien <KLH at MIT-MC>
- To: jsol at USC-ECL
- Re: Long debate on ZUM
-
- Perhaps you want to sanitize this stuff and re-distribute it to
- TELECOM. Note that SAIL bboards have the feature that people go in
- and add their comments and stuff, so what comes out is a dialogue.
-
- Date: 8 Dec 1982 1339-PDT
- From: Julius Smith <JOS at SU-AI>
- To: rachel at PARC-MAXC, klh at MIT-MC
-
- I thought you might be interested in this BBOARD item --- Julius
-
- 02-Dec-82 MRC 08-Dec-82 PB phone charges changes
- To: SU-BBOARDS at SU-AI, PCnet at MIT-MC
- I have just heard that GTE has filed to have one-minute rates for
- local call, and that Pacific Telephone is about to do so. This means
- the end of the flat-rate for local (ZONE 1) calls phone service,
- something of serious consequence for anybody who uses a terminal at home.
- That local call to your favorite computer at Stanford will soon cost you
- by the minute. Apparently, it was done this way because the PUC feels it
- would be more "equitable" to do this than merely to raise the cost of
- flat rate service.
-
- At the current measured service rate, a local call costs 3 cents for
- the first minute and 1 cent for each additional minute. So, a nice hour
- or so hack session would be "only" 62 cents. An hour a day for a month
- would be "only" $18.60. For us "office in the home" types, an 8 hour
- day in a typical 23-workday (assuming Saturday and Sunday off) month
- would be yours at the new low price of "only" $114.08.
-
- This won't just affect those of us getting online to our mainframes
- at work. Those free public bulletin board systems (BBS's) won't be a
- free call any more -- for anybody. I run a BBS; if people stop calling
- because of line charges I'll shut it down. I'm sure many other BBS's
- will die the same way. Commercial systems such as CompuServe, Dow Jones,
- and The Source will no longer be able to offer free local calls to their
- facilities; in addition to their connect time charges there'll also be
- line charges.
-
- This would mean the end of economical data service as we know it.
- Gone will be the myriad of vendors offering databases or selling modems;
- nobody will want to pay for data services if they can get the same
- services more economically in more "traditional" ways. Even the "PC net"
- sort of applications will be impacted. Who's going to download a file
- from somebody's micro if it'd be (much) cheaper to pick up (or even mail)
- a floppy?
-
- Not surprisingly, this is going to be presented in the propaganda
- as a major "rate reduction" and "a victory" for consumers. At least
- one group of consumers in the Silicon Valley won't look at it that way.
-
- PB - Well, this is another charge for use argument (like the one about SAIL)
- charges, but I'll risk a position opposite my previous one anyway. Namely,
- even though I'm likely to get screwed by this, you gotta figure that people
- who use terminals stay on the phone at least an order of magnitude longer
- than those who don't, and the poor regular slobs are paying for it, too.
-
- ARK - There is a difference between getting rid of flat rate service and
- timing local calls. Timing local calls will only adversely affect people
- with lifeline service (which the phone company hates anyway) and measured
- service, but does not affect flat rate service (as this includes all local
- calls regardless of duration). Getting rid of flat rate service would
- adversely affect a different group of people.
-
- By the way, in New York City there is NO flat rate service and the minimum
- service charge is about what the flat rate service costs here. You are
- charged by the "message unit" for all calls regardless of duration or
- distance.
-
- ME - The intention is to get rid of flat rate AND time local calls,
- that is, to charge by the minute for every call.
-
- jmc - Instead of just whining, it would be good if people would say what
- they consider to be a fair system of charges.
-
- ARK - I consider the current system to be reasonable. At least we are all
- living with it.
-
- 04-Dec-82 0136 Chris Ryland <g.Ryland at SU-SCORE> telephone charging by the minute
- Mail-From: G.RYLAND created at 3-Dec-82 09:57:15
- Date: 3 Dec 1982 0957-PST
- From: Chris Ryland <g.Ryland at SU-SCORE>
- Subject: telephone charging by the minute
- To: bboard at SU-SCORE
- Remailed-date: 4 Dec 1982 0137-PST
- Remailed-from: Yonatan Malachi <CSD.MALACHI at SU-SCORE>
- Remailed-to: other-bboards at SU-SCORE
-
- I, for one, hate the idea of paying by the minute, but have to admit that
- it's utterly fair: you're occupying circuits by the minute, and circuits
- are what the phone company sells.
- -------
-
- HPM - Pay for use charges like this will accelerate the arrival of all
- digital phone service, where you use time multiplexed equipment and pay by
- the moved bit. That would be much more efficient than the present
- kludgery, using a channel designed for voice (which is digitally encoded
- in the exchange, most likely, at a modem bit to PCM bit efficiency of 0.01
- or worse). Right now there is no penalty for this kind of massive waste,
- so us bit pushers have no incentive work for a sensible technical
- solution. Bell Canada has been offering a service like this to businesses
- for over a decade (and, except for the paying part, any hardwired user of
- the Arpanet does the same thing). A digital system could use the same
- wires to your house that a regular phone uses. The equipment at your
- local exchange would be different - it would just accept bits. Faster and
- cheaper modems can be used.
-
- jmc - The extreme estimates of the costs of using telephones at a cent
- a minute are out of line, because you can rent private lines. I believe
- mine costs $22 per month, but the distance is short. ARK's "stand pat"
- approach probably won't fly; liberal appointees to the Public
- Utilities Commission see (correctly) that the present situation is
- mainly a subsidy of mainly business use by voice users, a smaller
- proportion of which is business.
-
- bh - Private lines wouldn't help me; I call 4 or 5 different computers.
- (Not every computer is on the Arpanet you know.) Only one of those is
- a local call for me, but I wouldn't want to have a dedicated line AND
- a regular line and have to rearrange cables all the time.
-
- I don't see what digital service has to do with it. The digital
- multiplexing which is done for voice is done only between exchanges.
- If they charge by the minute for local calls, they are charging within
- an exchange, for which there is really nothing to multiplex. Perhaps
- they should distinguish calls which are local in the current billing sense
- but which are inter-exchange from those which are truly intra-exchange,
- and retain flat rate for those, and let us pay for Foreign Exchange
- service for a different exchange within the same city. But there are
- problems with that too: FX service works by dedicating a line between
- exchanges just for me all the time, whether I'm using it or not, so it
- is MORE costly in real resources than flat rate service, so it ought to
- cost more if we're being fair; also, for me the exchange I'd need a line
- in is UCB's centrex, and it's not clear there is such a thing as a private
- (non-centrex) service in that exchange.
-
- Or do you mean, HPM, that there is a way to multiplex the wiring from one
- crossbar to another within a single exchange?
-
- In any event, my guess is that they will claim their cost for local calls
- is for setting up the call, billing (a little recursion here), and
- the distributed cost of maintenance of your local loop.
-
- jmc - My guess is that there is considerable indeterminacy in allocating
- costs among services that use the telephone system in different ways.
- Therefore, there can be political bargaining on behalf of the computer
- users. Perhaps one should aim at a compromise of .5 cents per minute
- of hold time.
-
- HPM - I mean that digital users should connect to a TTY port on something
- like a TIP at the local switching office; from which point all communication
- would be by packet. There would be a short haul modem dedicated to you
- at each end of the line running between your house and the local exchange,
- unless the local exchange still had a mechanical crossbar, in which case
- it might switch you, as an analog signal, to an available member of a
- smaller (than one per subscriber) set of modems. This does require a
- serious re-organization, for which there has been very little incentive
- thus far, since phone rates were so low. I would think that some of
- this could be done by reprogramming electronic exchanges. If mother
- Bell drags her feet doing something, the economic pressure will burst
- the pipe somewhere else. Already there are negotiations between CMU
- and Warner cable in Pittsburgh to use spare bandwidth on the TV cable
- for citywide digital service (for all those personal computers). Tie
- that in to Telenet or a (hypothetical) MCI or Satellite Business Systems
- packet service, and the pressure on the Bell system to respond should be
- overwhelming. The net result should be increasing availability of
- digital service, increasing volumes of digital traffic, and a decrease
- of the costs of such traffic towards the actual costs of shipping the
- bits. Inefficient methods like the present "tie up an analog channel
- the whole time, even when no traffic, and send ridiculously slowly
- even when busy" will by rightly driven off the market.
-
- 05-Dec-82 0905 Mark Crispin <Admin.MRC at SU-SCORE> Chuck Gotlieb's comments about phone costs
- Date: 5 Dec 1982 0905-PST
- From: Mark Crispin <Admin.MRC at SU-SCORE>
- Subject: Chuck Gotlieb's comments about phone costs
- To: ICL.Gotlieb at SU-SCORE, SU-BBoards at SU-SCORE
- Postal-Address: 725 Mariposa Ave. #103; Mountain View, CA 94041
- Phone: (415) 497-1407 (Stanford); (415) 968-1052 (residence)
-
- Chuck speaks with as much authority on this as he did in the flame
- on sexism. The rate structure change will ABOLISH flat-rate (a.k.a.
- unlimited) calling. The telephone operating companies did in fact
- suggest a doubling or tripling of the flat-rate cost as an alternative
- to abolishing it, but the PUC doesn't seem to think that would be
- "equitable."
-
- A doubling or tripling of flat rate service costs is not of any
- concern to me. I'd gladly pay the additional ante, and would consider
- it a victory in that I kept my flat rate service.
-
- HPM's suggestion is definitely worthwhile, but my point of view in
- this is that of a user. I receive a certain functionality out of the
- telephone network at an economical cost; so economical, in fact, that it
- would remain economical even if it were doubled or tripled. A greater
- than order of magnitude increase, on the other hand, would not be
- economical. I have no objection to going to digital phone service,
- provided that I do not have to personally solve the technical problems
- involved.
-
- [rdg: This message references what I assume to be the message below which
- begins on line 227.]
-
- -------
-
- 05-Dec-82 1016 Chuck Gotlieb <ICL.GOTLIEB at SU-SCORE> Authority on sexism...
- Date: 5 Dec 1982 1016-PST
- From: Chuck Gotlieb <ICL.GOTLIEB at SU-SCORE>
- Subject: Authority on sexism...
- To: bboards at SU-SCORE
-
- MRC, what did that have to do with phones? My being a male at
- Stanford, with contacts in the CSD gives me more authority on sexism
- than most WOMEN. Besides, it was a pretty cheap shot. You can do
- better. Try harder next time.
- Nice to hear from you,
- Chuck
-
- -------
-
- YM - merged (l 160) we don't have here chuck's original msg.
-
- 05-Dec-82 1111 Neil Rowe <CSD.ROWE at SU-SCORE> paying by the minute for phones
- Mail-From: CSD.ROWE created at 4-Dec-82 15:24:33
- Date: 4 Dec 1982 1524-PST
- From: Neil Rowe <CSD.ROWE at SU-SCORE>
- Subject: paying by the minute for phones
- To: bboard at SU-SCORE
- Remailed-date: 5 Dec 1982 1110-PST
- Remailed-from: Yonatan Malachi <CSD.MALACHI at SU-SCORE>
- Remailed-to: other-bboards at SU-SCORE
-
- Ryland's argument doesn't make sense. The function of a telephone
- company is to provide an electronic connection between two points.
- Once this connection is established, minimal resources are needed
- to maintain it. Electrical connections don't "wear out" with use
- as furniture does.
- -------
-
- 05-Dec-82 1111 Chuck Gotlieb <ICL.GOTLIEB at SU-SCORE> Paying by the minute for phones... (|
- Mail-From: ICL.GOTLIEB created at 4-Dec-82 21:45:38
- [rdg: ***** NOTE => ****] Date: 4 Dec 1982 2145-PST
- From: Chuck Gotlieb <ICL.GOTLIEB at SU-SCORE>
- Subject: Paying by the minute for phones... (|
- To: bboard at SU-SCORE
- Remailed-date: 5 Dec 1982 1112-PST
- Remailed-from: Yonatan Malachi <CSD.MALACHI at SU-SCORE>
- Remailed-to: other-bboards at SU-SCORE
-
- If the average phone call is 3 minutes long, and the average
- modem session is 30 minutes long, then those of us who use modems are
- crowding out 10 others. Thus the phone company (TPC) is forced to add
- additional lines.
- However, during off-peak hours, it would be fair for modem users
- to get a cheaper rate, since we would be using excess capacity.
- And guess what? This is exactly what TPC is suggesting! It is
- a very fair proposition. Expensive, but fair...
-
- Chuck
- P.S. TPC will also be supplying unlimited phone service just like now,
- except it will cost 2-4 times as much.
-
- P.P.S. Until they change the rate structure, I'm going to stay logged in
- 24hrs per day, just so I can get my money's worth!
-
- P.P.P.S. From now on, perhaps we should start signifying flames about
- phones with the symbol (| since it sort of looks like a trimline set
- if you hold your terminal sideways (or if you hold your head sideways).
- -------
-
- 05-Dec-82 1112 Chuck Gotlieb <ICL.GOTLIEB at SU-SCORE> More on phones and MRC... :-)
- Mail-From: ICL.GOTLIEB created at 5-Dec-82 10:21:50
- Date: 5 Dec 1982 1021-PST
- From: Chuck Gotlieb <ICL.GOTLIEB at SU-SCORE>
- Subject: More on phones and MRC... :-)
- To: bboard at SU-SCORE
- Remailed-date: 5 Dec 1982 1113-PST
- Remailed-from: Yonatan Malachi <CSD.MALACHI at SU-SCORE>
- Remailed-to: other-bboards at SU-SCORE
-
- MRC, perhaps you can try to get rid of my ICL account since I don't
- agree with your opinions about rate structures.
- Chuck
- -------
-
- [rdg: merged from 206.
- Note the time each message was sent -- the listing in this page is
- chronological by arrival at SAIL, NOT by time originally sent.]
-
- DON - Maybe BH should rent a dedicated line to SAIL and use the dialer to
- call the other computers not on the ARPAnet. (What's going to be done about
- the dialer, anyway? Pay the increased cost for unlimited service? Start
- charging for its use?)
-
- 05-Dec-82 1343 hartwell@Shasta (SuNet) Re: More on phones and MRC... :-)
- Date: Sunday, 5 Dec 1982 13:45-PST
- To: Chuck Gotlieb <ICL.GOTLIEB at SU-SCORE>
- Cc: Mark Crispin <Admin.MRC at Score>,
- All Stanford Bulletin Boards <bboards at Shasta>
- Subject: Re: More on phones and MRC... :-)
- In-Reply-To: Your <bboard> article (Shasta.3335) of Sun Dec 5 11:15:54 1982
- From: Steve Hartwell <hartwell at Shasta>
-
- Now stop it, both of you. Leave bitchfighting to LOTS.
-
- [FY - merge]
-
- Date: 5 Dec 1982 2010-PST
- From: John B. Nagle <CSD.NAGLE at SU-SCORE>
- Subject: Telephony rate structure
- To: SU-BBOARDS at SU-SCORE
-
- PT&T's proposed change is part of a long-term plan of the Bell
- System to make charges more dependent on holding time and less dependent
- on distance. This reflects real costs and their need to respond to
- their competition (MCI, SPRINT, SBS, etc.). Historically, local calling
- has been subsidized by toll service. Now that AT&T no longer has a
- monopoly in that area, such subsidies are much less possible. Attempts
- by PT&T to charge a huge "access charge" for the ports at which the
- other long-haul carriers connect have been rejected by the California
- PUC.
- There are many implications of these facts which have not yet
- been generally realized. For example, AT&T operating companies
- have traditionally installed a comfortable margin of central office
- capacity for the number of phones installed, and have provided
- extremely high levels of service. In the entire history of the
- Bell System, only twice has a full central office gone down for
- more than thirty minutes for any reason other than a natural disaster.
- (The two failures were the CO building in lower Manhattan destroyed
- by fire in the mid 1970s, and the crash of an early #1 ESS computer
- driven CO (Plaza-5, again in Manhattan) in the late sixties. The
- motivation for the expensive redundancy which makes this possible
- was expressed in the Kingsbury Commitment, a little-known decision
- made by Vail early in the Bell System's history. Vail observed
- that in all other countries the government ran the telephone system.
- He decided that to both retain the Bell monopoly and avoid
- nationalization, AT&T would maintain a very high level of service and
- that this would be used as the major argument in fighting off
- government intervention.
- Now that we are in the era of deregulation, this no longer holds.
- I suspect that over time, in order to meet the prices of MCI and others,
- we will see a degradation of the uptime in the Bell System. Bear
- in mind that most downtime occurs in outside plant (lines) and
- most failures there are not due to internal equipment failure. The
- maintenance of the organization that can mobilize to meet major
- line damage is very expensive. MCI considers 1-week downtimes of
- microwave repeaters acceptable, and does not install fully redundant
- equipment in their long-haul system. (This info is from a discussion
- with a MCI rep last year, after SF-Detroit service was down for
- an extended period).
- I hope that this background may be of some benefit to those
- complaining about phone charges. I have no connection with any
- carrier, incidentally.
-
- John Nagle
-
- [DON - Merged from line 295]
-
- ARK - I don't believe this crap about private customers subsidizing
- business customers as the reason to get rid of flat rate service. After
- all flat rate service is only available to residential customers and all
- business service is measured.
-
- I do believe it is reasonable to charge any business phone line an "access
- charge" if it receives a high ratio of incoming to outgoing calls. For
- example, all incoming calls could be billed in addition as outgoing local
- calls (to pay for the circuit to the switching center).
-
- BH - Don, nothing need be done about the dialer, which is already paying
- per call, being as it is a business. John, I don't believe the statistic
- about only two outages over 1/2 hour. For example, Cambridge, MA was
- without telephone service for several hours the evening they installed the
- ESS, which promptly crashed. Hans, does your proposal mean that that
- phone wouldn't be usable for voice? That would be okay for us professionals
- but not for the hobbyist who makes long but occasional data calls on the
- same phone otherwise used for regular calls. Personally I would feel okay
- if local calls were metered only during business hours, as is, by the way,
- now true even for business lines, if I am reading the front of the phone
- book correctly.
-
- HPM - Voice could be PCM modulated in the privacy of your own home, and
- could then travel as any other digital traffic, except maybe
- the timing constraints would be more stringent. The cable TV version
- probably would not be reliable for voice, but a telco service could
- in principle switch your line over to a conventional mode when you weren't
- bit pushing. Though because of the extra switching needed a dual use
- line should cost more than either a digital or a voice only connection.
-
- 07-Dec-82 0903 CSD.SCHWARTZ at SU-SCORE (Michael Schwartz) phone rates
- Date: 7 Dec 1982 0904-PST
- From: CSD.SCHWARTZ at SU-SCORE (Michael Schwartz)
- Subject: phone rates
- To: su-bboards at SU-SCORE
-
-
- Does anyone know when the proposed change in rate structure might take effect?
- Thanks
- Mike
- -------
-
- 07-Dec-82 1114 Richard Treitel <CSL.VER.RJT at SU-SCORE> more phone rates
- Date: 7 Dec 1982 1115-PST
- From: Richard Treitel <CSL.VER.RJT at SU-SCORE>
- Subject: more phone rates
- To: su-bboard at SU-SCORE
- cc: CSL.VER.RJT at SU-SCORE
-
- As one whose long-distance calls eat up more than 90% of my telephone bill, I
- would have no objection at all to the proposed package of changes accompanying
- divestiture IF and only if I could feel sure that the rise in local rates will
- be accompanied by a corresponding decrease in long-distance rates. But what I
- suspect is far more likely, is that local rates will triple and long-distance
- rates will stay the same. A very plausible explanation will be advanced for
- this, of course, but explanations don't show on my bank balance.
-
- - Richard
- -------
-
- [rdg - 388]
- 07-Dec-82 1308 TVR Phone rates
- To: SU-BBoards at SU-AI
- By all means, i think we should fight this decision. After all, most of
- the long term modem use is off-peak hours. Even if it were only charged
- during the day, it's a bad precedence to set, as it could be very easy
- to then make that 24 hours. For the record, i don't mind paying a
- doubling of basic line charges.
-
- There is a concern for all of us, at least those who live in Palo Alto,
- and probably in the town(?) of Stanford as well. That is, the negotiations
- going on concerning cable TV. That, and possibly packet radio, are likely
- to be the long term solutions to this problem. I think we should begin
- lobbying for networking on the cable system, and attempt to get the city
- council to include that in its specifications for a cable system. It's
- do this soon, rather than trying to get it added on later. Remember, cable
- can provide much higher bandwidth that the telephone company is willing
- to even think about in the next N years.
-
- [FY - merge]
-
- PB - I think Tovar's on the right track. Lobbying the PUC would be a massive
- effort, and even of dubious merit. The only reasonable ( jmc won't agree i bet)
- argument for cheap flat rate service is that the government ought to subsidize
- the home computer hacker in the national interest, just as it subsidizes the
- car driver, rural postal user, neighborhood tennis player, airplane owner, etc.
- There is precedent for government acting ``in the common good.'' In this case,
- the tax structure is intertwined with the subsidy, but if it really were a govt
- subsidy, they'd raise the bucks by taxing phone use, no doubt, and then waste
- 50% in bureaucracy.
- On the other hand, phone lines are too slow anyway, and the city council sounds
- like they'd be more likely to listen to reason rather than power (or at least
- be snowed).
- (By the way, the correct grouping is ``home (computer hacker)'' not
- ``(home computer) hacker,'' just in case you were led astray.)
-
- jmc - Indeed jmc doesn't agree. The existence of some subsidies doesn't
- justify another, and I don't even see a liberal argument for a home
- computer subsidy. I don't believe the people who say their use will be
- stopped by $.60 per hour; your own time is worth much more than that to
- you. However, I do think that bargaining might reduce it - perhaps by
- half. Because so much of the cost of providing the telephone system is not
- usage sensitive, almost any group of users can try to argue that they are
- marginal and should pay only the additional cost of providing the service
- they use - rather than paying average cost plus their share of subsidizing
- those who get marginal rates or anyway don't pay average cost. Presumably
- some part of the cost of local service is proportional to hold times,
- specifically the cost of the switches themselves, but I doubt if it's
- much. This leaves plenty of room for politics, and I have to confess
- that aggrieved cries of imminent disaster for one's group are the
- customary form of politics. I just happen to find it somewhat disgusting
- even when I belong to the group on whose behalf the whimpering is
- taking place.
-
- PB - Well, I basically actually agree with jmc. I'm not pushing the subsidy
- argument, just saying it's the only reasonable one. I'd like to point out,
- though, that I currently get paid around $3/hour, so .60 comes to around
- 20% of my pay. JMC: are you willing to pay 20% of your pay for your phone
- service? Looked at another way, that probably comes to over 50% of my
- *disposable* pay. Are you willing ...mutatis mutandi?
-