km.emory@CSNET-RELAY.ARPA (Ken Mandelberg) (08/26/85)
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
{akgua,sb1,gatech,decvax}!emory!km USENET
km@emory CSNET
km.emory@csnet-relay ARPANETlauren@RAND-UNIX.ARPA (08/26/85)
There are some significant limitations to this service that people should be aware of (I talked to one of the system designers)... 1) Calls are limited to one hour. 2) While they haven't implemented the restrictions yet, they are likely to limit both the originating and terminating ends of the calls to phone numbers that are a LOCAL CALL from their dialout nodes. This might mean, for example, that a person in West L.A. couldn't use the service since they are not local to the dialout node (which is in downtown L.A.). The problem is that the service must dial out at both ends, and they are apparently unwilling to eat the ZUM/toll charges indefinitely. When and how restrictions would be implemented (and on what basis) is still unclear, but they told me that something would definitely happen in the area of restrictions. 3) The service is really designed for individuals, not for commercial use. They aren't trying to screen out the companies at this time and will let them sign up, but it isn't clear what will happen if commercial users start clogging things up. 4) Capacity is limited. In L.A., for example, there can only be a maximum of 24 users on the service at any given time. They can obviously expand this within some limits, but not indefinitely. 5) It isn't clear how good the response is going to be for many applications. TELENET is always very bursty and subject to pretty slow throughput much of the time (as any TELENET user will tell you). It's certainly an interesting service, but seems mostly oriented toward what they originally said -- people sitting there typing at remote BBS's. --Lauren--