🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <5ab8fr$arl@lila.thenet.ch>,
	outfindR@privid.er (outfindR) writes:

> Hat jemand eine Ahnung, wie ich auf das
> TELEPAC-Netzwerk komme, wo man
> Zugriff auf diverse Hosts und andere

When I was using that service, somewhere around 1990, the number was
(049) 04 11 11. It is of course offered by the Swiss Telecom. You had
to type . and then CR/LF. It was 2.4kbps only (last upgrade I heard
was 9.6kbps).

At that time, I had an account, and the taxes were quite high, the
speed quite low, but it was, at least for low volume interactive use,
cheaper than national public phone.

Some countries had no other reliable computer communication system and
were only reachable by X.25 --- some of the Internet connection in
those countries are still running under X.25. Also some France Telecom
feeds in Switzerland have been run with X.25 for many years (now
probably they switched to Frame Relay).

Also, it was possible to type R before the number and the other host
was charged for the call (only if the other allows it of course).
Switzerland had/has international dialing prefix of 228.

X.25 == { telepac | transpac | datapac | tymnet | ... } == dead

There was/is also a (commercial) service of quite low quality and very
expensive in Geneva, called Transnet, which can work as an X.25 pad.

Nowadays probably other service providers offer X.25 services (MCI had
a X.25 POP in Neuchatel for some years), such as Unisource ( == PTT ),
or others (such as France Telecom). But, for many packet switched
applications, IP and Frame Relay now are the standards. How much
time before ATM ?

PS: The ISDN standard has provision for using the D channel as a X.25
    transport channel. Not yet implemented by your nice Swiss PTTs.

PS/2: I have an (old) list of X.25 access number somewhere, dating back
      to the eighties, so that's probably obsolete anyway.