PC Pursuit

[Ken Mandelberg]

GTE/TELENET is offering a new service called "PC Pursuit". It allows
unlimited 1200 baud modem calls between 12 major cities for a flat fee
of $25/month. The calls can on|y be made after 6PM or on weekends.

Currently the cities supported are: Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas,
Denver, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San
Francisco, and Washington DC.

Only the originator of the call has to be signed up with GTE, the
destination can be any answering modem in the 12 supported cities.  The
$25/month buys the right to originate the calls from one fixed number.
GTE imposes this as follows: You call a local number, identify yourself
and make the destination request. GTE drops the line, calls the
destination, and when successful calls you back at your registered
number. They guarantee to call you back withing 30 seconds of carrier
at the destination.

GTE is marketing this to PC users who want to access out of town
databases. However, it strikes me that this service could cut
UUCP/mail/netnews and other phone based networking costs way down. The
service appears to be transparent to the destination, but clearly the
connection software would have to be hacked to accomodate GTE's call
origination scheme.

GTE will provide information about the service at 800-368-4215.

I have no connection with GTE, and the above exhausts my knowledge
of the service. I don't know, for example, if the data path provided
is really a full 8 bit path, or if there are timing issues that
would interfere with some protocols. I would guess they run their
own error correction for the long haul part of the circuit, and
the subscriber would only have to worry about errors on the local
circuits at the endpoints.

-- 
Ken Mandelberg
Emory University
Dept of Math and CS
Atlanta, Ga 30322

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