Kenneth_R_Jongsma@cup.portal.com (01/11/89)
Well, as it turns out, I wasn't as wrong as I thought I was. (Open Mouth, Remove Foot, Close Mouth) I received a call late today from my company's AT&T rep. She actually knew quite a bit about Switched 56 service. I shall attempt to paraphrase what she told me. Note: This is not an endorsement for AT&T. I assume MCI or Sprint can provide similar services. The biggest problem with my previous posting (in comp.dcom.modems), was saying to contact your RBOC for details on Switched 56. I tried that and found out that they know little about it and in many cases it may not be tariffed for local service yet. Call your account rep at your prefered Interexchange Carrier. If you use AT&T and don't know your rep, you can call 1-800-222-0400 and ask them to look up your rep's name for you. Switched 56 is available through most of country. Whether or not you can use it depends on how close you are to AT&T's Point of Presence (POP) and if your RBOC has the facilities (read: #5ESS, DMS-100, etc) in your area and the area you want to call. AT&T acts as a single point of contact for the entire circuit. Even though the tail ends of the circuit will be handled by the RBOC, you still call AT&T for installation, support, maintenance and billing. Rates are very contingent on what AT&T has to do to get the RBOC to install the circuit, so she wouldn't get me any ballpark prices. She was very willing to price specific circuits though. So... I stand by my original recommendation in that if you need small amounts (1-3 hours?)of large bandwidth a day, it may be very advantagous to consider pricing this option.