km@emory.UUCP (Ken Mandelberg) (08/21/85)
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 ARPANET