Path: utzoo!telecom-request Date: Sun, 28 Apr 91 13:46:53 EDT From: "Daniel R. Guilderson" Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: Decreasing Costs of Transmission Message-ID: Organization: TELECOM Digest Sender: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 11, Issue 313, Message 4 of 8 Lines: 20 Given that the recent posts about fiber optic transmission rates in the range of terabits per second are accurate, I envision a phone network in which people maintain a continuous live connection to a packet switched network. When that happens, it will make sense to charge a flat rate for most service and in addition a resource usage fee. People who don't make a lot of long distance transfers or transfer huge amounts of data will only be charged the flat rate. I like to try to imagine what it would be like if the internet adopted an RFC which specified a voice interface protocol. All you would need is an ADC and the right software and we could have voice transmissions over the internet. I bet that would really scare the hell out of the telephone companies. I think the lack of bandwidth is the only thing that's keeping it from happening. Daniel Guilderson ryan@cs.umb.edu UMass Boston, Harbor Campus, Dorchester, MA USA