FCC doing it again...

[Henry McGilton -- Software Products]

This thread doesn't belong in this forum, but while it's
here, this is my contribution:

In article <246 at cfa.HARVARD.EDU> wyatt at cfa.HARVARD.EDU (Bill Wyatt) writes:
    >...
    >I don't want extra charges either, but in addition to the above 
    >consideration, modem calls are not the same simply because they
    >usually last much longer than a voice call. Somewhere I read an
    >estimate that if only 20% of household had modems in regular use,
    >the phone system would be hoplessly bogged down.
    >...

And in article <20589 at Apple.COM> earlw at Apple.COM (Earl Wallace) writes:
    *  Why do we have to pay more bucks to operate our modems
    *  over the phone lines than a voice user?  If companies
    *  charged $$ based on how much of a service you used, the
    *  Post Office should charge MORE for bulk mail rather
    *  than less :-)


Telephone exchanges are costly animals to build and
maintain.  A telephone exchange is usually amortised over a
period of thirty or more years.  A telephone operating
company sets out in (say) 1980, to build a (say)
10,000-line exchange, based on tried and trusted technology
available at that time, and the exchange must then stay
operational until the year 2010.  As I'm sure you all know
(or should know), there is not a piece of switching
equipment dedicated to every subscriber 100% of the time.
The amount of switching equipment actually dedicated to
subscribers' lines is based on past history of and
projected future traffic patterns -- a complex distribution
of the number of calls per unit time, times length of call.

Events that perturb traffic upwards from the normal
patterns can overload the capability of the switches to
connect calls.  The earthquake in the San Francisco Bay
Area on 17th October was a classic example -- the telephone
switches were swamped for days.  Where you'd have to wait
upwards of 90 seconds for a dial tone you'd normally get
within one or two seconds.

What does this lecture have to do with modems?  Simply
this: a user of a modem is perturbing the traffic patterns
in a big way.  The number of calls made are probably about
the same, but the holding time of a call is now orders of
magnitude more than the average projected holding time.
The huge increase in use of personal computers and modems
have created a singularity in the traffic patterns for
telephone calls.  The operating companies simply cannot
respond to this increased demand in any reasonable amount
of time given the current technology.  Expect the situation
to get worse for the next ten years or so.  To build the
extra capacity before they are ready to do so, to handle
the increased traffic that'll be there before they expected
it, they'll need more cash to build the next generation of
exchanges. Therefore, they must charge more money now.  I
suspect, by the way, that it's not the FCC that initiated
the rate increases.  I suspect that the operating companies
reacted to the bind they're finding themselves in, and went
to the FCC asking for a rate increase.

	............ Henry


+------------------+------------------------+---------------------------+
| Henry McGilton   | I saw the future,      | arpa: hmcgilton at sun.com   |
| Sun Microsystems | and it didn't work.    | uucp: ...!sun!angel!henry |
| Mt. View, CA     |                        |                           |
+------------------+------------------------+---------------------------+