🚀 go-pugleaf

 Bill> == Bill Goffe x3806 <bgoffe@seas.smu.edu> 

 Bill> It would seem to me that Usenet could greatly benefit from ISDN.
 Bill> I'd be willing to bet that there are few nontechnical readers of
 Bill> Usenet at home.  The high speed and (hopeful) simplicity of ISDN
 Bill> could open up Usenet to millions who otherwise have no access.

 Bill> Anybody have any argument?

Not me, but I'm biased; the EFF is working towards affordable nationwide
ISDN, and the article you saw was part of that effort.

I recently (yesterday ;-) went to a New England Telephone seminar on
ISDN.  NYNEX is, according to their folks, the first regional Bell
access company to offer ISDN in non-Centrex/Intellipath environments.
They are offering it in residential and "single-line business" (which
doesn't really mean single-line businesses, just non-Centrex business)
as well as Intellipath.

It's $8/mo extra for ISDN service, plus charges based on what you order
(nothing for voice, $5/mo for circuit-switched data lines).
Installation is $15 per circuit-switched option (voice, data, or
voice&data) and $35 for X.25 packet-switched options (low or high speed).

The call charges for voice are "whatever you're paying now" (in my case,
unmeasured) and the circuit-switched data (64kbps) is less than a dollar
an hour.  The catch is that it only works within the same central office
right now.  The bonus is that it *may* be possible to get 56kbps
circuit-switched data over a "voice" connection, at voice rates...

Packet switching charges are convoluted, so I won't list 'em here.

I will be posting more details on this in comp.org.eff.talk later this
week once I've finished writing up the report.  I'm still waiting to
hear if I can get ISDN at home & work; if so, we'll have operational
tests to report in a couple months ;-).
--
Christopher Davis <ckd@eff.org> |    ECONOMIC OBSERVATIONS DEPARTMENT
System Manager & Postmaster     |  "There's always something going out of
Electronic Frontier Foundation  |      business in Central Square."
+1 617 864 0665  NIC: [CKD1]    |   -Rita Marie Rouvalis <rita@eff.org>