Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!accuvax.nwu.edu!nucsrl!telecom-request From: Dave Levenson Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: "Data Quality" Local Dial Lines Message-ID: <12433@accuvax.nwu.edu> Date: 22 Sep 90 11:45:17 GMT Sender: news@accuvax.nwu.edu Organization: Westmark, Inc., Warren, NJ, USA Lines: 55 Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 10, Issue 666, Message 6 of 11 In article <12375@accuvax.nwu.edu>, john@bovine.ati.com (John Higdon) writes: > Local calls are charged for and timed. Isn't one charge enough? Or is > data something "magic" that costs telco extra? What costs the telco > more: a twenty-minute news delivery from my news feed, or a two-hour > converstation by my neighbor's teen-aged daughter? See? Forget the > authoritative declaration from a Pac*Bell "informant" -- the logic of > the position fails as well. John is quite correct. Using today's technology, and using timed billing, data calls cost the telco what voice calls do, and they produce the same revenue that voice calls do. Extra charges for data calling are not justified. This may not always be true, however. Future trends go toward allocating only the bandwidth required to every connection. Rather than assign 64kbit/second of bandwidth to every conversation, whether or not it needs it, the future network will only assign the bandwidth actually required by the message channel being carried. Speech compression and coding technology has advanced a long way since the first digital telephony standards were written. An example of this trend is the use, in the coming digital cellular telephony networks, of speech carried at 8 or 16 kbit/second with sophisticated digital signal processing being used to remove virtually all redundancy from the channel. It's like running batched netnews feeds through compress(1). These channels don't work with wideband data. The amound of information is greater, and the amount of compression that can be realized is less. The minimum required bandwidth is greater. The cost is higher. At some point, we should expect the price to be higher. There is technology under development that will characterize individual calls as voice or data. Data calls will be further characterized by the amount of compression possible (i.e. the minimum required bandwidth). I predict that at some point, we'll not only find timed local billing, but bandwidth-dependent timed billing. It will probably work out that the cost of sending 100,000 bytes of data will be essentially the same, whether we use 1200 bps modems, 9600 bps modems, or ISDN digital channels without modems. The high-speed links will take less time, but the price per minute will be higher, to reflect the increased bandwidth requirements. What I don't know is how long it will be before such things become common. I do know that the call-characterization technology is under development for the RBOCs today. Dave Levenson Internet: dave@westmark.com Westmark, Inc. UUCP: {uunet | rutgers | att}!westmark!dave Warren, NJ, USA AT&T Mail: !westmark!dave Voice: 908 647 0900 Fax: 908 647 6857