From mkapor@eff.org Sat Apr 11 09:03:11 1992 Received: from eff.org by kragar.eff.org with SMTP id AA06116 (5.65c/IDA-1.4.4 for ); Sat, 11 Apr 1992 13:30:40 -0400 Received: by eff.org id AA01535 (5.65c/IDA-1.4.4 for pub-infra-exploder); Sat, 11 Apr 1992 13:03:26 -0400 Date: Sat, 11 Apr 1992 13:03:11 -0400 Message-Id: <199204111703.AA01530@eff.org> From: Mitchell Kapor Subject: Cable Television and the National Public Network To: pub-infra@eff.org (pub-infra mailing list) Following are my postings excerpted from a thread in the Well's EFF conference. Due to Well policy, I cannot supply other posters' contributions. My remakrs stand alone fairly well. I begin by replying to an accusation that EFF has swallowed the telco line on ISDN. EFF has not taken the telco "LINE" about anything, much less that they are the idea provider of telecommunications. What we have said is that ISDN is tactically very interesting as a first step toward a national public network which is digital, open, widely available and affordable. That said (and you can refer to the numerous statements we have made on this subject), it must be added that cable offers some interesting possibilities. It has a high bandwidth (hundreds of megabits per second) and already reaches 60% of homes, passing by over 90%. The biggest issue we see is that while the telephone system operates on a common carrier basis which requires the phone companies to accomodate all comers who wish to sujpply information on the network, the cable system operates under no such obligation. In fact, there is an enormous vertical integration in cable already with the major cable systems such as TCI and Time-Warner owning major interests in cable channels like CNN, HBO, and others. NBC was unable to mount a CNN competitor because TCI and others refused to carry it. In our vision of the national public net, it is crucial that everyone be allowed to participate, not only as an informationm consumers, but as a provider. Common carriage is the way to enable this. Interestingly, there are some preliminary moves suggesting ways in which this might be accomplished. One proposal, filed in the FCC hearing o video dialtone, suggests a "condominium" approach in which cable would install a fiber-coax hybrid system nationally and sell digital carrying capacity t other carriers (LEC's, long-distance carriers, etc.) who would then operate that portion on a common carriage basis. We are interested in exploring these options and discussions are underway. --- 64kb is not the upper bound for transmission over the copper local loop. ADSL and HDSL both offer high bit-rates to the home. ADSL provides full T-1 from the CO and some amount (9.6-64kb) back. HDSL currently operates at 768Kb, but it is fully symmetrical. You would need two pairs to get the full 1.544Mb. Both ADSL and HDSL are transmission protocols. In all probability ther higher level layer of the stack will be adopted from ISDN, according to the folks at Bellcore we spoke to. ISDN should not be thought of as simply providing a 64kb "B" channel, but as a protocol suite which can be extended to operate at higher speeds. In fact, Primnary rate ISDN's bearer channel's operate at 1.544 Mb. So ADSL or HDSL could be the means by which primary rate ISDN is made to run over a single copper pair. By focusing on ISDN, there is in fact a migration path to higher speeds, not a dead end. Basic rate ISDN is being deployed now. ADSL and HDSL are still under development and going into field trials. It will be years before you could get it at home, and that assumes that the telcos will be of a mind to tariff it affordably. We like HDSL because, as a symmetrical system, is will allow users to originate high quality video as well as to receive it. Meanwhile, it is likely that higher speeds and longer distances can be achieved over copper. At a Broadband conference last week, an infrastructure planning manager at Ameritech told me he thinks it's possible to deliver 3-6 megabits/second over the local loop using ATM protocols. Speculative, but enticing. The RBOCs have not given much thought to high- speed transmission over coper until very recently. We think they should pursue these prospects diligently. Various hybrid systems, comvining copper and fiber or copper and coax also seem worth investigating. We are making a visit to the FCC this week and to Cable Labs at the end of the month. This subject will be on the agenda both places. Meanwhile, EFF Cambridge is ordering ISDN lines for the office and at home of staff members. It's available in Mass. and priced at 1.6 cents per minute. We'll let you know how the experiments go. Right now it's only available within individual central offices, so its utility is somewhat limited. But it should enable users at home with Macintoshes to operate like they're on a Localtalk network to the office. --- The telcos have seen ISDN primarily as a voice service, whereas the immediate demand will be as a data service. ISDN adapters are available today for PC's for the same cost as a high-speed modem - $300-$500. Prices will fall further as volume goes up. Sun is widely rumored to be building in ISDN into every workstation. It will just BE THERE. Telecom market research firms may have some of their heads wdged in the same places as some of the telcos. Obvious ISDN applications exist now for LAN-extenders, work at home, Internet at home, etc. Enough to drive the first 100,000 users in the U.S., to show there is real demand for the service. Video telephones will be a very big market for ISDN as consumer units offering good quality over 64kb (bot 56) come to market over the next two years and crash through the $1000 then $500 price points. Cable has interesting possibilities, but they are not here and now. ISDN is being deployed here and now. Coax cable cannot handle two way high quality video now. Architectures to permit this are just being explored now. It will take several years if not a decade to develop the standards, protocols, implementations, and peripheral equipment required. We encourage this but think that's too long to waIt in the absence of an alternative. EFF is interested in a platform which is digital, has wide-spread availability, and which is affordable. Cable systems could play a key role here. We're interested in exploring this with them. Cable reaches over 60% of households and passes by over 90%. It meets the wide-spread availability criterion. Coax is very high-capacity, 1 gigabit over short distances. Hybrid fiber-coax systems, in which trunks are fiber to the pedestal, and existing coax to the home are being investigated heavily by cable industry. This is good. The cable industry will use digital cable to deliver more pay-per-view and video on demand of movies and other entertainment. This will pay for the investment required to upgrade (presumably). Cable itself is not under common carrier regime. This is a problem. Cable should consider creation of digital common carriage pipe within a pipe. Dick Leghorn's condominium scheme (proposed in his filing in the video dial-tone case) represents one approach in this direction. We think it should be explored further. In that approach other carriers like LEC's, IXC's own and operate common carriage service which runs through cable system. There has to be sufficient overall capacity, and new cable systems have to be properly architected from the outset to support this. Of particular concern is making sure it's fully interactive. Existing cable has trouble with interactivity, as architected with tree and branch structure as a one way system. It is not necessary that system be fully symmetrical, but it is necessary that the system allow for origination of high-quality video at any point, not just at the head-end. The cost to originate high-quality video need not be as low as cost to receive, but still needs to be affordable. This has to be defined. Finally, cable should be open to explore more creative relationships with telcos in the area of public infrastructure. For instance, in the use of ISDN in the near-term coupled with one way digital cable. One way digital cable can be done now without much if any enhancement of existing cable (I am told). If coupled with ISDN (meaning the subscriber has to have an ISDN line too) could be powerful next step. What's key here is to incorporate in the set-top converters the necessary electronics for both cable and ISDN in this case. From mkapor@eff.org Mon Apr 13 07:18:17 1992 Received: from eff.org by kragar.eff.org with SMTP id AA19129 (5.65c/IDA-1.4.4 for ); Mon, 13 Apr 1992 11:39:34 -0400 Received: by eff.org id AA18534 (5.65c/IDA-1.4.4 for pub-infra-exploder); Mon, 13 Apr 1992 11:18:20 -0400 Date: Mon, 13 Apr 1992 11:18:17 -0400 Message-Id: <199204131518.AA18528@eff.org> From: Subject: Frankston on ISDN To: pub-infra@eff.org (pub-infra mailing list) Prescript: I've been putting these comments together for a while, but at some point, I've got to ship the product even if it is not perfect nor complete. With that caveat in mind, I'm submitting this commentary on ISDN and the rest of the universe. I've just read through D.P.U. 91-63-B of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Department of Public utilities which is the response to the ISDN filings. I've already Prodigy's briefs on the subject. Though the language was a bit long winded, it was, to my surprise, fascinating. I don't know how these compare to what the situation is in other states, but there is some spirited opposition to NET's attempt to sell ISDN services at a high rate. The Prodigy filing also incorporated some of Mitch Kapor's research. I should also strongly emphasize that I am not a lawyer, I'm not well versed in regulatory law. I'm more a dabbler/kibbitzer in these matters, then an expert. Given all that, I'll attempt to give a biased summary of the filings and my reactions. More my reactions than summary. The basic position of NET is that ISDN is an optional offering that should be priced at competitive rates. Where competitive means "what the market will bear". Prodigy's position is that ISDN should be a basic part of the communications infrastructure and should be priced at a rate that would encourage its use, or at least, not discriminate against its use. NET referred to Prodigy's view as a "field of dreams" wherein Prodigy expects that if ISDN were available, people would flock to it. NET claimed its studies showed that there are people who would pay high rates for ISDN and thus it should be priced for the known customers. I call this "railroad pricing" referring to the days when the railroads were in decline and kept increasing their rates to get the same return from fewer passengers and thus reduced the number of passengers etc. Even worse, for communications offering, providing only one hand so that people can experiment with clapping has its limits. There is much discussion on what the actual costs of ISDN deployment are. This gets complicated because the costs of ISDN components vary due to accounting considerations as well as purchase price variations due to one time offers, quantity discounts and startup costs. The distinction between hardware, software and other components is not clear, so I resort to the technical term "stuff". The fact that these are not broken out makes it hard to evaluate some of the claims. The DPU seems to be caught in the middle. It seems to buy into the infrastructure argument but is very conservative on limiting NETs rates since NET must be allowed to recover its costs. Now a word from our sponsor -- me. I had a number of disparate (knowing how bad spelling is on the net, I should point out that that is not a typo for desperate) reactions to reading these filings. One question is whether ISDN is the right service for data. Some of the DPU discussion was on the relationship of ISDN as a data transport with switched 56KB (an example of high priced service). But there was no discussion on how to provide a connectivity other than point to point bulk data transfer. I realize the advantage of concentrating on ISDN issues is that there is at least some agreement on what ISDN is -- a necessary prerequisite for rational debate. Given the grief that NET is giving over ISDN deployment, asking for really different services seems to be an uphill battle. Which brings us to NET as a consumer buying merchandise off the shelf. It seems that once they've bought into an exchange (often the DMS-100) they are captives of their maintenance plan with the exchange. I can't imagine them buying anything nontrivial from anyone but Northern-Telecom for its DMS-100 COs. It doesn't seem they have much negotiating leverage. It would be nice to see the CO become a more distributed entity that allowed more mixing and matching from different vendors. For now, at least, it is not clear how to build such a system. This further concentrates debate on off-the-shelf ISDN because alternatives are problematic. NET whines about the difficulty of providing ISDN, yet they seem to have no problems if you want Intellipath and Centrex, both of which are ISDN-based services. This seems to be far from a level playing field. I'd like to see a situation in which NET couldn't base any of its services on ISDN unless others gain the same access. Of course, the fact that the ISDN services seem to run in the same switch as ISDN itself means that they can provide the services without the complexities of providing ISDN to third parties. This goes back to the issue of the monolithic CO. Perhaps ISDN can be a mechanism for brining CO capabilities outside the physical (or even logical) machine so that the protocols necessary for these services are provided at arms length and thus provide a mechanism for a marketplace. This issue of ISDN as a set of protocols for implementing a marketplace is an interesting one but not fully fleshed out in the current ISDN protocols. It should receive explicit attention in its own right. Given all this, it still galls me to see NET refer to capabilities by their service product names rather than the generic features. It also recalls the problems that "good' COCOTS have in trying to compete with NET in the pay phone business since NET gives itself a great deal on the costs of phone calls (of course, the fact that Massachusetts still mandates $.10 for NET pay phones is probably also a factor -- something that bespeaks a strong DPU which might make the state a good place for ISDN advocacy). The cellular phone network offers an interesting case study. In following the discussions of features of the cellular phone network, it feels like amateur night wherein features are cobbled together by kludging together disparate systems. A lot of the feature set depends on whether one happens to have an Ericsson or Motorola switch and what sort of jumpers have been placed between them. I get the impression that many features are implemented by placing a PC (personal computer) offnet and having it send back DTMF codes. I see this a symptom of the complexity of making any changes in the network. At least, in the network as currently architected The ISDN and cellular problems illustrate the problem of what happens when one buys a complete service from a monopoly. Unlike the PC world of mix and match, you get all or nothing. A long term agenda should be to go beyond simply breaking of ATT to architecting a communications infrastructure that consists of components. This is very very difficult, especially when coupled with requirements for reliable and predictable service. It is less clear that the current approach is more amenable to graceful evolution. A more modest approach is to encourage competition on the local loop. Perhaps the RBOCs should be divested of their control of the right of way and instead, all parties would have equal access to the communications right of way at a physical level. Access at a logical or signal level is more complicated. We'll see some of this in action now that Cable companies are becoming more of a force for loop competition. Cable company monopolies are anther topic I won't get into here. Back to my Ox. The current network is designed for voice communications with services like switched 56KB being viewed as expensive premium services. But the reality is just the opposite. Voice is very demanding of the network whereas data communications is very forgiving of delays and can recover from errors (OK, voice can tolerate many errors that give data fits). So why is voice cheap and data expensive? There are some answers in the current network architecture but these are not intrinsic. The other aspect is the circuit switched model for data communications. Admittedly it is possible to get an X.25 connection that does provide a switched service but I'm not confident that it is sufficiently standard for me to assume I can make a very cheap quick connection to a service and be charged accordingly. If I want to get one stock price, how much overhead is involved? If I want to keep simultaneous connections to multiple services is there a holding charge? I realize that there is a contradiction between my asking for a raw service from telco and the ability to then buy enhanced services from other parties. But is the raw service copper to the CO and a voice path or is it a datapath. If a third party provides the packet service, do all messages have to travel through the network and then get redispatched? Are there sufficient standards for things to "just work"? This brings us to the concept of intra CO tariffs These do exist for Centrex and might exist for early ISDN capabilities which can be supported within a switch but which must await protocol upgrades (SS7?) in order to communicate with other exchanges. I can image that a call within the exchange being essentially free but having a significant charge to call the next town. Or should social policy minimize this? We already have the example of cable TV systems where I simply cannot get broadcasts from the next town -- a very bad precedent but something we accept as if it were natural rather than a kludge while we await BISDN (where BISDN is a code word for switched video but not limited to ISDN protocols). Postscript. I've seen mention that NET has adopted ISDN pricing that is akin to standard message unit service but haven't seen the details. I've also received a brochure from Nynex touting Basic Exchange Service which seems to be their ISDN Centrex replacement that lists a menu of features that you can select 3 of plus optional features. Of course, it is these services that are being offered, not "raw" ISDN. [Pricing in Mass. is 2.6 cents per minute for the first minute for residential service, 1.6 cents per minute thereafter. For businessis, the rates are 9.6 cents for the initial minute and 1.6 cents thereafter. This covers service to the CO. Inter-office tariffs will be filed by the end of the year. - Mitch Kapor] From mkapor@eff.org Mon Apr 13 08:34:21 1992 Received: from eff.org by kragar.eff.org with SMTP id AA21273 (5.65c/IDA-1.4.4 for ); Mon, 13 Apr 1992 12:51:54 -0400 Received: by eff.org id AA20460 (5.65c/IDA-1.4.4 for pub-infra-exploder); Mon, 13 Apr 1992 12:34:26 -0400 Date: Mon, 13 Apr 1992 12:34:21 -0400 Message-Id: <199204131634.AA20454@eff.org> From: goldstein@carafe.tay2.dec.com (k1io, FN42jk) Subject: ISDN backbone costs, prices To: pub-infra@eff.org (pub-infra mailing list) Bob Frankston's comments, and Mitch's earlier comments from another bulletin board, both point out the importance of ISDN usage pricing. How much does switched data differ from voice? New England Telephone's new Mass. tariff assigns measured voice usage rates to switched intra-office ISDN switched 64 kbps. Most businesses have to pay measured usage anyway. Residential customers in Mass. are entitled to pay for flat-rate local voice calling, with various radius options in the Boston area. But that's not to be applied to ISDN clear- channel 64 kbps. Some other telephone companies have offered voice/data parity for ISDN. I believe that's the case with Southwestern Bell and Pacific Bell, as well as BT (aka British Telecom). Of course, BT doesn't offer any flat-rate local calling to anyone; their local message rates are higher than anywhere in the US. Within a CO, voice = data is a good assumption. Everything's handled at 64 kbps. So parity is logical. But Mass. DPU has a veneer of justification for requiring this to go at message rate: The flat rates were set based upon the typical voice user's traffic. While modems benefit from that (we don't face the odious "modem tax" here the way some SWBell and Moscow Tel customers may), it's still a distortion of the "intent" of flat rates: If ISDN were offered for flat-rate usage, then a single ISDN access line could make _two_ simultaneous calls for "free", one on each B channel! The fix to that gets confusing. The new Mass. tariff charges a fixed surcharge, atop your voice line rate, for ISDN. It doesn't matter if you're Metropolitan or Measured service. If you could make two calls at a time over one Metro-rated ISDN line, they'd be "losing" the revenue that they'd get today by selling you a second Metro line, which costs quite a bit more than a Measured line. The rational-user's response is also interesting. I think that it's possible to make two "speech" calls at a time over an ISDN line. A "speech" call falls under the flat rate. I assume NET doesn't figure that this will be a big problem. To be sure, the "problem" is not one of "losing money" (rate lower than cost), but of "opportunity cost" (lower profit margin). The 1.6c/minute measured rate (over a nickle beyond 8 miles) is way, way above their true cost. It subsidizes the low basic residential rates and cheap installation rates. Crocodile tears come to mind. Now, the rational-user's response is applied to data. If the call is the same voice or data, why even tell the network that it's data? If you originate a local call bearer service = speech, it'll still carry data at 56 kbps, if not the full 64 kbps (American T1 being an issue). So you may still get the flat rate for data. Is this "cheating"? No, because the network is only delivering the grade of service that you contracted for, which is speech, and any ability to send data is without warranty of any kind. Furthermore, you _have to_ do this in order to go between COs. Without SS7, all interoffice calls default to speech, and data calls fail. Since the interoffice trunks are (almost?) all digital now, why not use them for data anyway, over the Speech bearer service. That's actually an official feature of the Digiboard IMAC remote ISDN to Ethernet bridge. It will do 56 kbps over Speech calls, complete with echo suppressor cancellation tone (needed for long haul inter-LATA use). And it's a capability that some telcos actually tell us to use -- Pac Bell mentioned it to customers as a work-around for the lack of SS7. I hope to "test" it over NET's network this year. So the data price is a compromise between different theories, and you don't really have to pay it anyway. What a country! :-) This, btw, really bewilders ISDN users in Europe. They don't even dream of trying this "speech" hack. They don't usually need to, anyway, and they worry that they'd not get PTT certification for equipment that ran that way. And they're too timid. And they don't have flat rate local calls to begin with. And it's not in the CCITT Recommendations. It's not even called out explicitly in the ANSI Standards. So it's a mandatory part of ISDN "folklore", which implementors have to know, but nobody wants to write it down. fred From mkapor@eff.org Mon Apr 13 16:14:50 1992 Received: from eff.org by kragar.eff.org with SMTP id AA03544 (5.65c/IDA-1.4.4 for ); Mon, 13 Apr 1992 20:33:21 -0400 Received: by eff.org id AA00491 (5.65c/IDA-1.4.4 for pub-infra-exploder); Mon, 13 Apr 1992 20:14:54 -0400 Date: Mon, 13 Apr 1992 20:14:50 -0400 Message-Id: <199204140014.AA00483@eff.org> From: Subject: NET & DPU -- A glossary To: pub-infra@eff.org (pub-infra mailing list) For the sake of the furriners in California, NET=>New England Telephone, part of Nynex (our RBOC). DPU is the Department of Public Utilities that attempts to regulate such matters. I apologize for forgetting that Massachusetts is not the world. From mkapor@eff.org Tue Apr 14 03:30:42 1992 Received: from eff.org by kragar.eff.org with SMTP id AA14565 (5.65c/IDA-1.4.4 for ); Tue, 14 Apr 1992 07:53:45 -0400 Received: by eff.org id AA26080 (5.65c/IDA-1.4.4 for pub-infra-exploder); Tue, 14 Apr 1992 07:30:53 -0400 Date: Tue, 14 Apr 1992 07:30:42 -0400 Message-Id: <199204141130.AA26059@eff.org> From: Jack Powers Subject: Cable vs. telcos To: pub-infra@eff.org (pub-infra mailing list) Fellow pub-infra readers, I'd like to comment on Mitch's remarks concerning "swallowing the telco line" about ISDN: Mitch is right about cable companies not being common carriers, either in fact or in spirit. Anyone who wants to "do data" on a CATV system (and I have done it) will have deal with a few unpleasant realities: - Most cable systems are one way only (simplex). [This forced me to invent a hybrid that uses the phone in the reverse direction for all the cable systems in the region of interest.] True, the FCC encouraged cable companies to build "2-way capable" systems, and a few of them did. However, the fact is that about 95% of the US cable systems transmit in 1 direction only. The exceptions include numerous short 2-way hops built to comply with franchise agree- ments requiring links for cities, schools, etc. "2-way capable" means only that the 1-way amplifiers can be replaced with (more expensive) 2-way units if desired. - Cable industry people are mostly unfamiliar with data transmission and their first reaction to a proposal to "do data" is usually worry that it will interfere with the TV business that pays their wages. - Many cable systems are owned by big holding companies called "Multi- ple System Operators" (MSOs). If you want to interest your local system people in doing data, you may have to sell the concept to MSO management far away both geographically and organizationally. - Cable transmission technology is changing rapidly. While this offers the possibility of a bonanza of bandwidth at *some* point, many system operators are waiting for a shakeout in vendors and technology. - A big wave of interest in Metropolitan Area Networks using CATV fizzled a few years ago- along with it went a very comprehensive design by Sytek called Metronet. Some cable people think that data had its chance and failed, forgetting how fast the technology and customer needs are changing. - Many cable systems have major hassles with their TV customers and franchising authorities about quality and value of service. They are not looking for new alligators in their swamp. I don't want to be a wet blanket - I believe that cable has a great potential for interactive, high bandwidth data services. However, I think Mitch is right in concluding that ISDN is the best way to get to a "Network Nation" (Murray Turoff's term) in time. I'm not a telco bigot, either. Most telcos (read: big bureaucracies filled with conservative voice specialists) aren't smart enough to deploy residential ISDN on their own, they need to be motivated. There has been talk of using the "carrot" of deregulation to force telcos to build a massive local fiber network infrastructure. I think it makes much more sense to motivate them to deploy ubiquitous ISDN... NOW! In a few years, the cable and telephone people will get together and wire our homes for interactive, high bandwidth services. In the mean time, we should leverage the existing twisted pair cable plant with technology that is proven and standard. That's ISDN. Jack Powers jackp@well.sf.ca.us jackp@netcom.com --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Opinions expressed here have the full concurrance of my employer (me). From mkapor@eff.org Tue Apr 14 10:55:27 1992 Received: from eff.org by kragar.eff.org with SMTP id AA23800 (5.65c/IDA-1.4.4 for ); Tue, 14 Apr 1992 15:15:04 -0400 Received: by eff.org id AA03796 (5.65c/IDA-1.4.4 for pub-infra-exploder); Tue, 14 Apr 1992 14:55:29 -0400 Date: Tue, 14 Apr 1992 14:55:27 -0400 Message-Id: <199204141855.AA03791@eff.org> From: Christopher Davis Subject: EFF ISDN Lab Report #1 To: pub-infra@eff.org (pub-infra mailing list) The Switched Circuit #1 - 92/03/31 (Reports from the Electronic Frontier Foundation's ISDN Lab) by Christopher Davis and Helen Rose This is the first in a series of reports from the EFF's new ISDN Lab, where we'll be working with the recently-tariffed ISDN offerings from New England Telephone, as well as as many different kinds of ISDN hardware as we can get our hands on. We recently attended a seminar on ISDN given by New England Telephone for the benefit of telecommunications consultants. Though they focused primarily on the business aspects of ISDN (no surprise there) they did make the point that they were tariffing the service for residential lines, "regular" single-line business service, and INTELLIPATH Centrex. (The apparent market focus for the residential offering is work-at-home or "telecommuting" opportunities, but the residential service is not crippled in any way.) The tariffs are interesting in their affordability; this is *not* the gold-plated service offering we've seen from some of the regional Bells. (Note that these only apply to Massachusetts; Maine and Vermont have similar offerings with different tariffs, and we don't have copies of those tariffs.) Installation charges for ISDN Basic Rate Interface (BRI, which supplies 2 B channels plus a D channel for call setup and/or low-speed X.25 packet data) are low (regular installation charges, plus $15 for each circuit-switched voice, data, or voice/data B channel) and monthly rates are only $8 over the regular rates for that class of service, plus $5 for data or voice/data B channels. (Packet switched connections at either high or low speed are more expensive, however.) One very nice feature is that NET is not charging the usual monthly surcharge ($2+) for tone service; this makes the price of an ISDN line actually *cheaper* than two voice lines (which many people have in order to make data calls while leaving their "normal" line free). Though you can't order two of the same type of B channel, the voice/data channel can be used for either voice or data on a per call basis, allowing you to order a voice channel and a voice/data channel to get, in effect, two voice lines (while also having the ability to do circuit-switched data). Voice calls are charged at the usual rate; if you have unmeasured voice service, you're not going to be stuck with measured ISDN voice service. Circuit-switched data calls (64kbps) are charged at measured rates (until September 25, at business measured rates--currently $.0963 for the first minute and .016 for each additional minute; after September 25, residential customers will pay $.026 for the first minute), but are only available (currently) within the same central office. NET plans to make interoffice connections available starting 4th quarter 1992. The ability to do long-distance ISDN will have to wait for National ISDN-1, which probably won't happen until 1993 or later. It may be possible to do 56kbps data over an ISDN "voice" connection, since the voice connection is merely a bit-robbed digital end-to-end connection. This is one of the first things we'll test; if true, it will make an already affordable ISDN tariff even more so. As part of the ISDN Lab, we'll be trying ISDN between our place and EFF's Cambridge office, allowing us to test both the residential and business offerings, and everything from straight 56/64kbps "fast modem" style connections to AppleTalk and IP over ISDN. As part of this effort, we will be working with several computer and telecommunications hardware providers to try out various ISDN terminal adapters, routing software, and the like. If you have questions about ISDN, or suggestions for the ISDN Lab, send electronic mail to isdnlab@eff.org.