Hi, I'm Norma Allen.
And I'm Esther Kaplan.
We are with a team of educators and activists who founded the Cheney Goodman and Schwerner
Academy, a public high school named after civil rights workers slain in 1964.
Our school opens this fall in Williamsburg with a commitment to academic excellence,
multiculturalism, and social change.
We are looking for ninth graders for September.
If you're a student or a parent, call us at 718-488-0637.
The Cheney Goodman-Schwerner Academy, a public high school in Brooklyn at 718-488-0637.
This announcement is a public service of WBAI Radio on behalf of Friends of Cheney Goodman
and Schwerner Academy, a non-profit community organization.
And it's just about 8 o'clock on a Tuesday night, time for another edition of Off the Hook.
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall.
I cut myself while shaving, now I can't make a call.
It couldn't get much worse, but if they could, they would.
For Billy Bond, for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood, for Billy Bond.
Okay, how does this—oh, that sounds much better, doesn't it?
Yeah, okay.
We had a weird-sounding microphone before.
How's your microphone sound, Fiber?
Uh, I'm not on.
Yes, you are.
Say, check, one, two.
The red light doesn't say on.
Well, your voice in my ears says—
Oh, over here.
Okay, it's very confusing.
No, that's—
All right.
We don't use that one.
Check, one, two.
You're on the red one, not the blue one.
Three, four.
Yeah.
That's mixing and matching.
We don't do that around here.
Good evening.
Another edition of...
Off the Hook.
Hey, I know them.
This is our original theme.
Yeah.
Which we discarded back in 1973,
and apparently somebody found it and then released it.
Yeah, they're called Prodigy.
Yeah, and I bet they think they're prodigies for doing that,
but in actuality, they just—well, they just borrowed it from us.
Did you hear about Prodigy being sued by IBM and Sears?
You're joking, right?
Yeah, I'm joking.
Okay, all right.
Pretty funny.
Well, it's another edition of Off the Hook,
and we have all kinds of fun facts to share.
This is our special ABSL show, which we'll be getting into in just a little bit.
Fun OmniPoint things going on,
and some other companies as well getting into the—
The free.
I guess, yeah.
I straightened out most of my OmniPoint problems.
That's good.
Yeah, I talked to somebody.
They called me back like they were supposed to.
Of course, I wasn't in, so we had to play tag a little bit,
but we finally connected, and they were pretty helpful.
It still takes 45 minutes to get an answer.
Yeah, but originally it took an hour.
Yeah, yeah, that's true.
It's getting better, slowly but surely.
It was good to have them fix things sort of on the spot, which is also nice.
You know, my OmniPoint phone, though, I used it today as a way of finding something.
I was driving around, and I couldn't—
I knew there was a whiz around somewhere because I had to buy something,
and then the thing starts going off, and I know there's a whiz nearby
because that's the only place in Suffolk County where they have transmitters,
and it kept getting stronger and stronger.
I just moved in that direction, and there it was.
I had no idea where it was before that,
but I used it to actually track down a whiz, so they're useful in that regard.
Whiz finder.
Yeah, exactly.
Before that, though, I was out by the airport, MacArthur Airport.
Yeah, that's another airport.
MacArthur?
MacArthur Airport, yeah.
MacArthur International Airport.
International Airport.
Consider Connecticut International, yeah.
There was a signal out there somewhere.
I was trying to track it down.
Occasionally the phone would light up, and it would say OmniPoint.
But the weird thing is that it would not actually send me my messages.
If you don't have messages for a couple of days,
you're supposed to get them as soon as you get into the rain.
Right.
Well, it didn't happen out there.
How many divots did you have out of your four divots?
Like two.
Yeah, two is kind of like skating the fine line.
Right.
But as soon as I got to the whiz, I got seven messages right there.
Yeah.
But here's the weird thing.
I was trying to track down this signal, and it locked on like two little, what do you call them?
I call them divots.
I don't know if there's a name.
Is that even a word?
Divot is a word.
All right.
Well, whatever.
Two of them.
I had two.
Squares.
And I was driving around.
I noticed, you know, first of all, I would drive by a place, and I'd get a signal.
And I'd drive by it again, and I wouldn't get a signal.
So I couldn't quite figure that one out.
But then I noticed that I was getting a signal, and it was pretty steady.
In fact, it was incredibly steady.
I was driving.
I kept driving, you know, one mile, two miles, three miles.
Wow, they're in Suffolk County, and they've got a rock steady signal here.
Not a great signal, but, you know, a pretty good signal.
And then I started to suspect, you know, maybe something's wrong here because nothing's changing.
Usually it gets stronger and weaker as you drive around, and nothing was happening.
And so I tried making a call, and it said, what does it say when it makes a call?
Connecting, right?
Right.
Did it say something?
No, it says dialing.
Then it says connecting.
Right.
It says connecting once it gets a signal.
So it just said dialing.
It was just sitting there.
And nothing was happening.
Nothing was happening.
So then I turned the phone off, thinking I'll turn it back on and see if there's really a signal.
And there wasn't.
It wouldn't turn back on.
What?
The phone would not turn back on.
Were your batteries dead?
No, the battery was fine.
It just wouldn't turn back on until I disconnected the battery.
Really?
And then reconnected it again.
And then I turned it on, and there was no signal whatsoever.
The whole thing was a malfunction of some sort.
You had a total phone crash.
I've never seen that before.
A real crash, yes.
I've had a different sort of phone crash, which are common with these Ericsson phones.
You mean the rebooting?
Yeah, the rebooting thing.
You know, they've pulled these Ericsson phones off the market.
Yeah, I know.
Totally.
The newer ones are nice.
There's a newer model that's already being carried by OmniPoint.
It's the Ericsson 388.
The 388 looks almost identical to the 337, only the screen is bigger.
Sorry.
It's clearer.
It's got a couple of nicer features.
One of them is if you use your GSM phone for data, you can use the full 9600 bits per second,
which I know doesn't sound super fast, but for wireless right now, it is kind of fast.
On the 337, these Ericssons, you can only go up to 2400.
And that's really a limitation of the firmware on the phone.
But 9600 is the limitation of the network right now.
I was playing with another type of service today, not OmniPoint.
I was playing with Nextel.
Nextel.
Now, they've got some pretty neat features here.
One of them, like some of our callers have been talking about over the last few weeks,
concerns actually speaking to somebody as if they're holding a radio.
You enter a five-digit code, and then you start speaking.
It goes beep, and you speak, and your voice comes out of their phone.
No matter where they are.
They don't have to be nearby.
They could be anywhere.
And we did this to a couple of phones that were next to each other,
and there's a slight delay, sort of like an OmniPoint delay.
But it's called—well, there's several ways you can do it.
You can send a message to one person, or you can send a message to a group of people.
They call it making a group call.
Press the mode key until group ready is displayed.
This is the group call mode default display.
Your active talk group is displayed, such as sales, or something like that,
or Third Avenue hit squad, or whatever business you happen to be in.
To initiate the call to this talk group, press and hold the PTT,
which means push to talk, button, wait for the chirp sound,
and then speak into the microphone.
Now, this costs $0.12 a minute, and they bill you by the second.
And there's no minimum for the first minute.
So, I don't know, if you just say, hey, what that winds up costing, but it's pretty cheap.
I just think it's really neat you can do that.
But there's a big downside to this, too, and I don't think they've quite realized this yet.
I don't see any method of turning it off.
I mean, five-digit numbers, it's not too hard to find a few
and to start really making someone's life miserable by constantly speaking out of their phone.
I don't see nothing in this book about blocking unwanted speakers.
Well, in looking into Nextel, I've seen absolutely no mention of security,
and I doubt there is any, other than the fact that it's digital.
Well, it's TDMA technology.
Yeah, but it uses its own thing.
It's a proprietary Motorola protocol.
Transmits on 806 to 821 MHz, receives on 851 to 866 MHz,
and TDMA Quad QAM.
Yeah.
The name of the actual network is IDEN, I-D-E-N.
It's little i, capital D, capital E, capital N.
It stands for the Integrated Digital Enhanced Network,
and that's actually the network technology that Nextel is based on.
IDEN, from what I can tell, was actually an invention of Motorola.
Yes, Motorola and IDEN are trademarks of Motorola Inc.
Right.
And you can actually check it out on Motorola's website.
They have all kinds of information about IDEN.
That's M-O-T dot com?
Yeah, W-W-W dot M-O-T dot com.
What happened to Motorola dot com? Some wise guy get that somewhere?
They have both. It's just quicker to type MOT.
Okay, I guess.
Yeah.
But the technology seems fairly interesting,
but I'd be really concerned about the fraud implications.
It looks like a system just waiting to be broken into.
Because it's basically, IDEN is a two-way radio system.
It functions basically the same way as Dick Tracy's two-way wrist radio,
only you don't wear it on your wrist.
It's a two-way radio system.
It's not an actual cellular network.
It's a radio network.
Does that OmniPoint phone over there have signal?
Can you get me the weather forecast for Wichita, Kansas, please?
Sorry, I just needed to know that.
Okay.
He's taking care of that.
All right.
We have other exciting phone news.
Hear that dial tone?
Wait. Hear that dial tone?
Yeah, there we go.
Yes.
What kind of a dial tone is that?
What do you mean?
Well, how would you describe that kind of a dial tone?
Would you like the frequencies?
No, no, no.
What kind of a dial tone is it?
Whose dial tone is it?
It's a happy dial tone.
It's not a happy dial tone.
It's a 9X dial tone.
Right.
No, it's not a 9X dial tone.
No, it's a Bill Atlantic dial tone.
That's right.
We talked about this last week, over the past couple of weeks.
And guess what?
Well, I don't think we're going to guess.
We're going to actually do this.
We're going to make a collect phone call.
Whoops.
Never dial zero before you dial nine when you're on an internal system.
Yeah.
Okay.
And we're going to, I guess, dial BAI.
Listen to this.
Welcome to Bill Atlantic.
Wow.
Yeah.
That wasn't even James Earl Jones.
That was a fake.
Now, is that James Earl Jones?
For collect calls, press 1-1.
That does sound like James Earl Jones.
To charge this call to another number, enter the area code and number now.
For person-to-person and other calls, press zero for the operator.
We're going to hit zero and see what company they say.
Okay.
Please hold for operator assistance.
We're sorry.
Due to heavy calling, we cannot complete your call at this time.
Will you please hang up and try your call again later?
Sounds like he dropped his phone.
Well, it's good to know that the 9X tradition continues,
even under the Bill Atlantic name.
What, you don't know how to spell Wichita?
He doesn't know how to spell Wichita.
Oh, for crying out loud.
W-I-C-H-I-T-A.
Kansas.
K-S.
Not K-A.
You'll get Kazakhstan or something.
Yeah.
That's kind of funny, don't you think?
Yeah, that he doesn't know how to spell Wichita.
No, not that.
That they don't have time to take our phone call, Bill Atlantic.
I don't think that was James Earl Jones.
I think that was a fake.
Well, that guy definitely wasn't James Earl Jones.
No, that wasn't.
That guy was James from down the block.
But the first guy.
Yeah.
Sounded like a really cheap imitation.
Well, I don't see how we're going to find out if they won't talk to us.
Yeah.
But we have years of Bill Atlantic ahead of us to figure it all out.
So, we'll just have to see.
Hey, Pam's here.
Hi, Pam.
Hello.
How you doing?
I have a little bit of a cold, but I'm great otherwise.
Now, you have an announcement for us concerning...
Yeah.
...some Hope-related stuff, right?
Yeah, I know.
You know, we think we're beyond Hope,
but I still owe a lot of people some photo ID.
Anybody who's local should come to the 2600 meeting this Friday,
and they can pick them up.
I will have them there.
If you can't make it, I'll mail it to you.
That's my announcement.
Okay.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
I'm still trying to dial, though.
Eric's busy, so...
So, if you can say anything else, I'll be grateful.
Well, I just want everybody to know that I'm okay.
I got a lot of concern, and just thanks you all for your well wishes.
And now we're going to go forward.
And everybody did a really great job for me.
I haven't been on this show since Beyond Hope, and I'm really happy.
Oh.
Okay.
Well, we're trying to get Wichita, Kansas over here.
But the phone person is having spelling problems.
Oh, okay. That's a problem, I guess.
I'm sure he'll figure it out.
Let him deal with that.
What do you have there?
I have these crazy people known as the Breaking News Network, Inc.
Now, wait a minute. Hold on a second.
I heard about this story last week.
You know, the day after we did a show last week, I heard about this.
I'm sure everybody...
It was the front page of the Daily News.
It was the top story in all the 11 o'clock news, you know, tabloid things that come out here,
about these people that were intercepting pager traffic of the mayor, the police commissioner,
all these people, and selling it.
And I guess the implication was that they were invading privacy.
But what nobody seemed to focus on was the fact that this is all broadcast, you know,
not encrypted or anything.
Anybody...
It's like turning on a radio, you know?
When you get paged, it's just...
You need the right kind of radio, obviously.
But once you have that, you can just see whatever is being paged to whatever person.
And that includes alphanumeric text.
I mean, I think it's kind of sleazy to sell the information,
but that's just a personal opinion.
I don't think it's illegal.
I mean, actually, it is illegal, technically,
because, I mean, the federal government says it's illegal to listen to certain things.
It's illegal to listen to cellular phone calls.
It's illegal to listen to pagers.
But I think that's stupid.
I mean, you know, we've talked about this for years,
and this is the first time it's actually come up with pager traffic.
So, I don't know.
Do you have any other information on that?
Well, there was a hostage situation in North Brunswick, New Jersey, at the Rusty Nail.
What does that have to do with anything I'm talking about?
Because this was one of those very pages.
Oh, okay.
So, you somehow have obtained pages.
These are actual pages, yeah.
So, do you realize it's illegal for you to have those pages there?
Well, somebody handed them to me.
I don't know anything about them.
I'm just an innocent.
You can get this on their web page, which is www.breakingnews.com.
And they have examples of the kinds of things that you'll find.
So, there's a whole big statement on their web page as well about how they feel they're innocent.
But, I mean, even if they did what they're saying they did,
actually, no, they're accusing them of making beepers that actually, you know, cloning beepers.
That seems a little bit too much for me.
Well.
But just listening in, it's like listening into a scanner.
Yeah.
You know, I don't see that as a crime.
No, well, I don't either.
I'd like to know what people think about that.
Okay, we've got the Wichita, Kansas weather forecast here.
This afternoon, increasing cloudiness with a 40% chance of thunderstorms high around 90.
90.
South wind 10 to 20 miles per hour shifting to the northwest.
Thank you.
Wow.
Thank you very much.
We've got the phone here.
We just got the weather forecast for Wichita.
Does this do Canada?
I don't know.
I never tried.
Okay.
Well, maybe you guys can see if it does Canada because we have somebody on the phone with us from Canada, from Ottawa.
Yeah.
Network is joining us.
Network, are you there?
Yes, I am.
Hey, Manuel.
How are you doing?
Good, fine.
How are you?
Okay.
Now, you're actually a very lucky person because, well, not just because you live in Ottawa.
It's a really nice place.
But you have something that we don't have yet.
Can you tell us what that is?
Well, we've been selected for the trials here in Ottawa for ADSL, a new type of switched Internet connection,
which gives us significantly higher throughput than with a typical analog modem or even an ISDN digital connection.
Can you give us an idea what kind of speed you're getting with this ADSL?
Well, it does vary between installation to installation.
And that primarily depends on your distance from the central office.
With our installation, we're about three blocks from the CO, and we are seeing the closest theoretical maximum,
which is 6 megabits to us and 640K from us to the CO.
Not bad.
No, it's not bad at all.
Not bad.
And you say that's going to be increased over the years.
Yes, they are.
They are, in fact, working on it.
ADSL was conceived in 89 by Bellcore, and at that point it was designed for 1.5 slash 64K.
But through 92, 93, 94, they got leaned on, and they were able to increase it quite a bit.
Now, what's the actual setup like?
What do you need?
Well, all you need is Bell to hook you up with an ADSL line,
which is really just an analog line with some extra switching stuff on the other side.
And you have to get yourself an ADSL modem.
And what are those run for?
ADSL modems, depending on the variety of features and whatnot, some of them have IP packet filters,
some of them are serial, some of them are like the Offend 50s with the 10BASE-D connector on them.
It can go anywhere between $6,000 and $2,000, depending on what you want.
That's Canadian, of course.
Right.
About $2 US.
I see.
And now the service itself.
The service itself.
What does that want to be?
Well, officially Bell hasn't released an idea on what the price,
well, exact figures on what the prices will be.
However, from who I've talked to, which is people who are running the trials,
they are trying to keep it competitive with cable modem service.
And up here that costs about $55 a month.
That's Canadian?
Yes.
That's practically nothing.
Yes, it is.
It's actually, it works very well.
And with the exception of a couple of kind of interesting quirks that it has,
rural areas that are, you know, farther than 18,000 feet from the central office,
you won't be able to get ADSL.
Anyone that has a kind of a voice coil or a loading coil,
which is a device that the telcos use to boost treble on a line that's on a long, long run,
they won't be able to use ADSL.
And if you've got another line or a phone line running close to your ADSL run,
when it rings, you'll lose packets because of the crosstalk.
Wow.
Is that going to be changed in short order?
Well, I mean, that's a problem by design.
I mean, ADSL is actually, for all intents and purposes,
it is a standard analog phone line, but you can actually still use it as a phone line
when you don't have ADSL connected.
You can have your phone connected and you get your dial tone and whatnot.
And it's just that they use, the voice still runs from 0 to 10 kilohertz
as per standard on normal phone lines,
but they use from 25 kilohertz to 1 megahertz to deal with the digital channels.
And those don't do very well on copper to begin with,
but due to the wonders of the telcos, they've been able to do that.
But when you get stuff like, for example, if you've got one pair,
which is a standard phone line, and you've got your ADSL line
and your standard phone line rings, then you could lose,
you could have up to a 200 millisecond or microsecond drop in service,
which ends up being about 1,000 bits of data.
So for IP, it's not really a big deal.
But you can notice small dropouts, you know, when,
if your line runs near a fridge or anything with a motor in it,
and the motor kicks in, you lose it for a little bit.
But, you know, only something you'd really see if you had,
if you were sniffing a wire or something, something we never do.
Right. Now your company up there is Bell Canada, right?
Yeah, Bell Canada are the big brothers up here.
Now, who are they marketing this for, businesses, people?
Actually, ADSL is being targeted for residential.
It's being, we have a company up here called Rogers,
which is our cable service.
And they've been introducing cable modems all over Ottawa and Ontario.
And Bell is coming out with this to compete.
And, you know, so far it looks like they're doing a pretty good job.
ADSL is available almost everywhere now in the urban areas.
And it's planned to be, you know, as you said earlier on,
we've been working on beefing up the speed quite a bit.
Figures in the range of 7 megabits to, you know, downstream
and an upstream channel of 4 or 5 are not unheard of.
Fiber, how does that compare to T1 speeds?
T1 speeds are symmetric, 1.544 megabits, which isn't very fast compared to this.
My problem with this is that it's a lease line service.
Who are you connecting to?
That's correct, actually.
While you are talking to, you do end up talking to a switch for your analog calls,
for your standard voice calls.
Right, right.
Your connections, which are the higher bit stream digital calls,
are actually, when you get your line installed, they're configured for a provider.
Right now in Ottawa there are two providers.
There is Bell Canada, Bell Simpatico, and we've got another one,
iStar Internet, which we currently have our link through.
So the providers do exist.
And I've talked to a couple of people here in New York who say
that they have every intention of offering ADSL to our providers.
Bell Atlantic is going to be offering this, I believe, as early as next year, if not earlier.
And like Bell Canada, they'll be targeting residential customers.
Now, we're not sure what kind of pricing they have,
but we have a sense of what the pricing is up there.
I think we should expect about that kind of level.
Well, the most expensive part is the modem currently.
And, I mean, you could pay, you know, as I was saying,
very little for a modem that's just like a BitSurfer,
or you could pay quite a bit for something that does quite a bit more
with all the filtering and whatnot built in.
Well, my question is, as far as the Internet service providers themselves,
can they handle that kind of traffic, you know, getting, you know,
a connection to the net and giving all these people ADSL connections?
You know, what do they have to do to provide that?
Well, iStar is one of the backbones here in Ottawa,
and they're, you know, they're fortunate enough to be in that position.
But I think some of the other providers that have T1s or, you know,
two or three T1s or, you know, even 10 T1s wouldn't be able to offer this kind of service.
It would just saturate their links way too heavily.
But, yeah, there'll have to be upgrades on all different levels for this to really be used to its max.
Absolutely, and it's unfortunate that currently there's no service offered
which would be the equivalent of, say, for example, a PRI service for ADSL,
you know, like PRI was to BRI.
For providers who wanted to get, you know, provide ISDN,
they just got a PRI and then they just, you know, cut it up and surfed it out.
But that's not available for ADSL yet.
And there's going to be some interesting problems with selling this.
In fact, while the infrastructure is in place and it is available on a test basis here,
it won't be available for the average consumer for a couple of months.
And how they're actually going to sell that is kind of still in, still quite nebulous
due to the fact that ADSL starts out, when you turn on your modem, you plug it in,
it makes the connection, the peer-to-peer connection, it tries to talk 6 meg by 640k.
And then it slows down, it basically slows itself down until it works
for the particular length of run of wire you have.
So someone who may be in a suburban area may get the minimum, the 1.5 by 64k.
Whereas myself, downtown, I might get, you know, the full rate, which we're very close to getting.
And as far as I can tell, Bell doesn't plan on prorating that in any way.
You know, so, you know, I may pay $40 a month, which really isn't a big deal when it comes down to it,
but, you know, but the guy down in suburban Ottawa is going to be paying $40 as well.
For less service?
For quite a bit less service.
Now, is there any indication that Bell might want to not provide the full maximum bandwidth to everybody?
Maybe they'll cut it down?
Well, that is possible, but I don't think so.
From what we've seen so far, Bell is pushing, pushing, pushing,
at least up here on the test bed platforms, you know, the maximum speed of ADSL.
It's available.
People are using it, and I think it's just going to be one of those things.
I think the unfortunate thing about ADSL, which is something that's fairly interesting,
is that it is an analog system.
Still, you can't use your phone and you can't be, you know,
mucking around with a digital channel at the same time.
And due to its overwhelming popularity over the past year or so as it's been coming up to speed,
it's likely going to be around for 20 to 25 years or, you know, even maybe more.
And this is something that a lot of the engineers are quite, you know,
miffed about because this is pushing off full digital service,
something that everyone's wanted.
Well, the engineers anyway.
Yeah, well, you know, what would you rather have?
I mean, would you be satisfied with, you know, 1.5 by 64K or 6 meg by 640,
even if that pushed off the advancement of full digital service for another 10 or 15 or 20 years?
Well, I mean, do you think it will really have that kind of an effect?
Are we talking about the same type of service?
I think we're talking about a completely integrated service, you know,
a type of service where speed doesn't become so much of an issue anymore.
A type of service where, you know, number of lines and whatnot, that's not really more of an issue.
I think it's a whole new – we could be possibly embarking on a whole new paradigm for communications,
and I think that's something ADSL is delaying.
But, you know, I'm quite happy to sit with the ADSL.
It works very well here.
Fabio, do you think that this is going to hurt things like ISTN?
Yeah.
The problem is I don't know how 9X or Bill Atlantic or whatever the hell you want to call them
is going to market this because when they're charging the rates that they are for ISTN
or even to have a T1, where does ADSL fit?
It doesn't fit anywhere.
Right.
They're going to have to totally restructure all their tariffs for all their digital services.
Well, who would want to get a T1?
Well, that's the whole point.
Right.
So I don't see this happening anytime soon in our area or any other area in the United States.
Well, I think Bill Atlantic wants to do this really soon.
I've been hearing about this now for several months.
Yeah.
Well.
I predict.
I'll make this prediction.
One year from now, from this date, somebody in this room will have ADSL.
Well, that may be true, but what are they going to do with all the people paying $500 a month to have a T1 line?
Well, how did that work up in Canada?
Do they have an answer for that?
I'm sorry?
All the people that are paying already huge amounts for T1s and those lines?
If you need, if you absolutely need one by five, you know, if you need a guaranteed symmetric service, then ADSL is not for you.
If you're doing any type of real-time or time-critical communications-oriented applications between two peers,
where in a kind of an electrically or magnetically noisy environment, ADSL likely is not for you.
You know, if you're doing anything like that, then, you know, you may want to go with more conventional services.
But ISDN, you know, I see it as being dead as soon as ADSL is brought out.
Because, you know, the worst that you could possibly do is get better than ISDN speeds.
I would explain the 9x free ISDN offer that just ended.
I think a lot of people have reached the same conclusion.
That's really, it's interesting.
Bell has also waived all ISDN installation and charges here as well and dropped their tariffs on that as well.
So there's no penny a minute surcharge or anything like that?
There is, but there isn't.
The normal installation charge has been waived for Centrex ISDN, which is the business ISDN, which is unmetered.
The residential ISDN has been switched.
The tariff used to be billed, you know, by the minute or by the second both ways.
It's now billed only for outgoing calls during peak period.
So if your ISP dials you, no one sees a bill.
I see.
Wait, so your business calls are unmetered, but your residential calls are metered?
There are two types of ISDN offered here.
There's residential and Centrex.
Centrex normally costs between about $300 to install and costs about $75 a month for both B channels unmetered.
Residential service costs about $100 to install.
It's $50 a month for both channels, and you end up paying, I think it's something like $1 an hour now per peak.
Now, for Centrex, you get two-hour response, technical support at your door.
We will make it work.
For residential, you are at the mercy of the standard bell phone jockeys.
Interesting.
You're paying for the peace of mind.
Wow. So have a lot of people gotten ADSL up there?
Well, the trial program, it was filled and, you know, saturated within a couple of days of it opening up.
Interestingly enough, the first place to go ADSL was Ottawa's farthest rural area, Kanata, and also our high-tech area.
Downtown has just gotten ADSL in the past month, and it's slowly starting to spread out.
The trials are underway.
So far, things look really, really quite well.
We haven't had any dropouts in service whatsoever.
Tell us, what's it like to be on such a fast connection?
What kinds of things might happen that we wouldn't ever fantasize about?
I don't know. I've never been on dial-up before.
You've never been on dial-up?
No.
Never?
No.
Wow.
But when I first moved in here, we were on dial-up for a while, and it was pretty nasty.
But, I don't know, stuff like, here, I just did a file transfer.
2.2 megabytes received in 8 seconds.
Stuff like that.
I imagine it's a lot like using your own local Ethernet.
In fact, it is.
I mean, when one of my roommates is, you know, I've gotten slower performance on the local area network
when one of my roommates is doing something on his machine.
Wow. What's it like going to web pages?
I guess you're limited by the speed that they're connected.
Yeah, yeah.
But, you know, on the larger websites, you know, for the larger linked ones, you know, it's just instantaneous.
It is very little wait.
I mean, you spend more time waiting for your web browser to come up than it does for the page to come up.
Right. There's no way they can increase the speed of that, I guess.
No.
All right, we're going to take some phone calls.
212-279-3400 is our phone number.
If you have any questions about ADSL and what it means to us, what it means to you,
and we would like to stay on the topic.
So if you have, you know, some sort of problem with your, I don't know, custom calling features,
maybe this isn't the time to speak about that.
Basically, this is something that you can expect to see in the local area.
Now that we're all one family, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, this is the first week, actually, that we can say that.
The rates haven't changed yet.
They haven't introduced new calling patterns, but I imagine that's just around the horizon.
Have you heard about this network up there?
Yeah.
9X is no more.
That's pretty incredible.
There's changes right across the board, Emmanuel.
I mean, everything is changing, you know.
What's changing up there?
Anything big?
Well, with ADSL stuff, it's going to mean some real different metered stuff.
Next year, we're looking at AT&T coming up here to start offering local service.
That's going to be really quite large.
Really?
I mean, Bell's had a monopoly up here on local service ever since, you know, things started up here.
How is it you get AT&T to offer you local?
I mean, are we going to get Bell Canada to offer us long distance?
I don't think so, but, well, I mean, your rates are about a quarter of ours,
even when you take the $1 U.S. to $500 Canadian exchange rate.
Yeah.
Don't you get free directory assistance to the United States?
We get free international directory assistance.
Yeah.
You know what it costs us?
It costs us something like $6.50 per request.
Yeek.
Yeah.
Well, I guess there are some perks there as well.
I mean, the Canada-wide phone book is on the net and stuff like that for searching.
But, you know, AT&T, Bell's getting quite a nasty wrap-up here lately.
I mean, they've recently had to outsource all their wiring.
Bell no longer does wiring or installations.
You can now choose a company that you, you know, an electrical engineering company,
to come in and do it for you, stuff like that.
And if you don't know anything about these companies, what, you just pick one at random?
They give you a list of certified sites and certified companies, and they will come and do it for you.
But you have to make the decision.
You have to make the decision.
Interesting.
Well, I guess there are changes.
But up in Canada, there's a bunch of phone companies that we probably haven't ever heard of,
that are all regionally, you know, defined.
They are defined regionally.
Manitoba Telephone System, you know, Alberta Telephone.
The thing is, is that they all, they're all basically sister companies off the same branch.
They're all managed, you know, they all are really part of Bell,
and they're all part of the super conglomerate Stentor up here,
which is basically the company that reports to the Canadian radio telecommunications people, CRTC.
Right.
You know, but service got pretty bad here for a while,
and things started happening, and Bell's now had to outsource a lot of things
to make sure that services is back up to spec.
Okay.
We're speaking with Network from Ottawa, who is filling us in on what it's like to have ADSL,
which is a way of connecting to the net at lightning speeds, faster than you could ever imagine,
faster than an ISDN, faster than a T1.
Faster than the net, for that matter.
That was the point I was trying to make before.
You know, can the net handle this kind of thing?
I guess it's going to have to at some point.
Mm-hmm.
Are any of the commercial providers supporting this?
Like, I don't know if you can get AOL up there, not that I consider them a provider.
Well, we have AOL Canada, but they don't offer any form of ADSL.
Right now, it's pretty limited to the two in Canada.
Right now, it's ISTAR and Simpatico, which is, of course, Bell's attempt at being a provider.
And how is that going?
Simpatico is kind of interesting because, basically, if you sign on for long-distance with Bell,
now that there are so many long-distance carriers up here now, AT&T and Sprint and whatnot,
you get a free account, and X hours free.
So, I mean, they're having a lot of problems with dealing with the fact that all these people
that want to get on the net are now signing up with Bell.
And, of course, you know, they have all sorts of machine-related problems
as well as logical problems to deal with.
But on the whole, it's not too bad.
ISTAR hasn't given us any problems yet, and I think we'll stick with it.
212-279-3400 is our phone number.
Let's go to our first listener phone call.
Good evening. You're on the air.
Hello?
Yeah, speak up.
Yes, I'm not going to be on the subject because I'm calling from Utah, so you can't really...
You're calling from Utah?
Yep.
How are you calling from Utah? How do you even know we're on?
I'm listening to your real audio files all the time.
I see, but you can't hear us now because we're not live.
No, so I can't be on the subject if you have a subject.
That's true. Well, okay, let me ask you then.
Have you ever heard of something called ADSL?
Yes.
Oh, boy. Well, that's great.
Okay, well, that's what we're talking about tonight.
I really didn't expect you to say yes.
Well, what do you think of ADSL out there in Utah?
Um, I don't know.
Isn't that how you...they change the...they somehow make...
so you can do, like, four times the speed of ISDN through...
No, that's...well, it's more than four times the speed, isn't it?
Yes, it is.
It's pretty fast. Network, why don't you tell our caller from Utah how fast it is?
Well, the maximum speed, that theoretical speed that you can obtain is...
No, sorry. It's 6 meg to you and 640 K from you.
Oh.
Is that fast enough?
Yeah, that would be nice compared to my life.
A little 33.6 is a little bit faster, but...
Yeah.
So, what part of Utah are you from?
Um, Utah, just the Central Valley.
Central Valley. Is there much of a hacking scene out there?
Not at all.
Uh-huh. Wow.
I was going to think about starting up a 2600 meeting,
but I don't think everybody attends.
Everybody here is too morally and ethically right.
They don't think this is stuff...
Is the whole state like that? All, like, ethically right?
Well, I haven't heard of anybody else except my friends that are really like this.
But there's a couple.
Uh-huh.
Not really widespread.
It's just kind of, you know, close friends that are interested in this kind of thing.
How'd you wind up there?
How'd I wind up where?
In Utah.
Um, you have to ask my mom that.
Oh, boy.
She picked the state, and I don't like it here.
You see, it's impossible for us to imagine life outside New York City.
Oh, yeah.
That's, um...
I'd like to live in New York, personally, because they actually have digital switches,
and you can actually get ISDN here.
You can only get secondary ISDN, which is only two B channels.
Uh-huh.
I don't even think you can get secondary.
Let me just talk to my friend real quick.
And even if you can get it, which is in Provo, the city ahead of us,
you can only go up to 64K a second.
So it's not really worth it.
Farber, any advice for this person?
In Utah?
Besides move?
Well, I don't know.
They probably like it out there.
I could get a PC dish, but that's kind of expensive.
Actually, yeah.
Now, I don't know anybody who actually has direct PC,
but supposedly it's good, from what I hear.
But don't they have the dual package now?
I can watch the cable TV and have the...
That's right.
I just heard about that today, in fact,
that they're sort of merging DSS and direct TV,
so you can have one dish that does both at the same time.
But isn't the whole problem with that,
that you can receive stuff over your dish at really high speed,
but you connect out over a telephone?
Well, yeah, but that's what they're doing now.
They're connecting over a telephone and receiving over a telephone.
It's got to be better than that, right?
Yeah, I suppose so.
I think you should take what you can get, you know, and before...
But you have to use a regular 28-8 modem to connect out.
Or a 33-6.
Yeah, or a 33-6.
Well, 56K, yeah.
Yeah, well, you know, it's possible...
Do you think network they'll ever have ADSL in Utah?
In about 40 years.
40 years? What do you think?
Well, I don't even think we have digital switches yet.
I mean...
That's interesting. I wonder if they do.
As I mentioned earlier, ADSL is an analog system.
The problem with some of these rural areas, as I said,
is where the runs are extremely long,
and from the way you're greater than 18,000 feet from the central office,
what happens is the treble on the line drops out.
The high frequency drops out.
So what they do is they stick these little cigarette-sized things
called loading coils on the line.
And what those do is they're basically treble boosters.
And ADSL functions above 25 kHz,
so it basically filters out all the ADSL.
So you can't get it if you're stuck that way.
The only solution is, of course, to put in some kind of a repeater,
a broadband analog repeater.
Which I imagine they'll get around to at some point,
but they'll probably first have to get around
to putting some digital switches out there.
Yes.
All right, listen, best of luck to you out there in Utah.
Okay, thanks a lot.
All right, take care.
See you.
I can't believe the first call we get is from outside the listening area.
Yeah.
Pretty weird.
That's what happens to you when you're up on real audio on the net.
We're not up live.
Not yet, anyway.
But I guess you'll hear this show in about a week or so.
All right, let's take another phone call.
You know, these buttons are impossible to press.
Okay, there we go.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Yes, Emanuel.
How are you doing?
Great, but hope was the best.
Absolutely the best.
I'm glad you're able to make it.
I'm sorry, this is the first time I've had a chance to talk to you.
Absolutely fantastic.
By the way, all my friends down in Virginia there,
That's what we're now part of.
Please.
We're now part of the same phone company as you.
I understand.
I'm in New Jersey, so I've had to put up with it.
Anyway, they promised the delivery of ADSL in less than a year.
Yeah, that's what I heard.
I heard that several months ago.
Lower than $50.
Wait, where'd you hear lower than $50?
Well, that's what they're trying to hold it down to.
And you heard this from the engineers?
Could be $49.
Right.
Could be $49.
That's not bad.
Yeah, and he just got a Zeisel.
He's on ISDN.
He just got a Zeisel Router Prestige 100, which I almost just bought,
and now I figure forget it.
Less than a year.
So, I mean, why buy it for a year?
Yeah.
Network, what kind of prices do providers want for ADSL,
or has that not yet been set?
Well, that hasn't been set yet.
The only places that ADSL is currently available, as I was saying,
was on a trial basis, and that's free.
Right.
But, I mean, do you have a sense as to what it's going to be?
Is it going to be more expensive than ISDN service?
Well, you know, as I was saying,
it has to be in line with Rogers Wave up here,
and that means, you know,
cheaper or around the ballpark of $55 CAD a month,
which is a cup of coffee for you.
What is it that says it has to be that price?
Well, that's a strategy that Bell's taking up here.
Well, that's for the line, though.
I'm talking about for the service.
No, no, no, no.
No, that is fully integrated line and service.
Really?
Yes.
Absolutely.
That's pretty amazing, and that's unlimited, not timed.
That schema hasn't been worked out yet,
but the properties, you know, given the way ADSL works,
it would make it extremely difficult to meter it.
I mean, how are you going to meter it per bit, per byte?
People, I guess, people all over the place have to worry about this
when they're offering metered services,
but the speeds of ADSL make it a little bit currently unfeasible.
Bell hasn't announced at any point, at least to us,
that this will be a metered service.
Any other questions, Caller?
Well, I don't think that maybe it won't work in the Wall Street area
because of all the electromagnetic static,
but I think that it will certainly kill any T1 lines in any residence,
and I can't wait.
It's only a year, but, gee whiz, they're going to be biting my fingernails.
Okay.
Well, don't bite them too much.
Right.
Hopefully it will be less than a year.
Yes, hopefully.
Okay, thanks so much.
Thanks for calling.
Bye.
That's pretty interesting, Emanuel, Wall Street not being able to get it.
Well, we don't know that.
I imagine they'll try to get it.
They'll try to figure out a way to defeat that.
Emanuel, I'd be willing to say that if the general public can subscribe to ADSL
a year from now, I will eat my hat.
You don't have a hat.
But I'll buy a hat, and then I'll put salt on it and eat it
because it ain't happening.
There is no way, no how there's going to be ADSL within a year.
What, you really don't think there's going to be ADSL?
No.
Mark down the date, okay?
It's what, September 2nd, right?
Yeah.
1997.
All right, September 2nd, 1998.
All right.
Well, we won't be on the air, but does anybody have a calendar for 1998?
Yes.
Okay, pull out the calendar, figure out when we're on.
Assuming we don't get moved again, which I really hate.
I hope we don't get moved.
We should be on a year from now.
Make it like, you know, a day after.
Like, it'll be September 3rd or 4th or something like that.
7th.
7th?
No, 8th.
8th, September 8th.
All right, so September 8th, 1998, we will do a show.
And either we have ADSL or we don't.
Right.
And what do I have to do if we don't?
You got to eat a hat, too.
I don't know.
I have a hat, so.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, I'm talking ADSL for the general public, not like,
we got a special trial offer deal if you live in Poughkeepsie kind of thing.
You know?
No.
Why is it always Poughkeepsie?
That's where they always trial stuff first in 9X.
That's, yeah, it's just not fair.
Yeah.
Wow.
I'm just trying to picture what the net is going to turn into with this kind of bandwidth, though.
I mean, I think, you know, real video will be something very real.
It will be using a lot.
You know, the sound quality of files will, you know,
we won't have to worry about downloading huge files anymore because they won't be so huge.
I think we just need to put things into perspective.
Right now, all the major backbones of the Internet are at 44.736 megabits.
That's the speed of a T3 line.
And a single one of those lines, you get seven or eight people using ADSL, you know, cross-country,
and there's a bit of a problem there.
There is an initiative by, you know, Spanky, Alfalfa, Al Gore, and the rest of the NII guys.
And what they'd like to do is, you know, get the whole infrastructure built up with ATM,
asynchronous transfer mode.
I remember Morris being into that.
Oh, really?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
They haven't actually been deploying ATM too much.
I mean, there's some ATM out there on the various Internet backbones, but not a whole heck of a lot.
So if they deploy this, what will happen?
If they deploy the two, then it will work out nicely because the lowest speed,
like the entry-level tier to ATM, which is an OC3 line, is 155 megabits.
So that's a far cry better than a T3, which is really the top of the line on the T carrier,
since they had a T4 spec, but they never really used it.
So T3 is really burning the candle.
So you think we're going to have to upgrade on that end first before we can introduce ADSL?
No.
I think they could continue to gradually introduce ADSL as long as they are acting on building up the infrastructure.
If they're introducing the last mile too quickly, then there's going to be a serious bottleneck.
There's already a serious bottleneck right now.
Right.
And, you know, from what?
From a whole lot of people using really slow modems.
I think we should restrict use of the net.
Yeah.
You have to have a license, and you have to pass an intelligence test.
Yeah.
It should be like the ARRL.
Exactly.
All right.
Let's take another phone call.
212-279-3400.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Hi.
How are you doing?
Good.
All right.
How are you?
I'm pretty good.
All right.
I had a question for a network about ADSL.
Yeah.
I was wondering.
I was reading something a while ago about the cable modem networks
and how there's big dangers with that with packet sniffing.
Anything like that exist with ADSL?
Well, cable networks, at least in Ottawa, are not the best for security, obviously.
From the cable center to the blocks, it's actually divided by zip code here.
There's a 30-megabit connection running.
And within your area code, all the feeders are shared.
So you can, for example, jump on and start sniffing.
However, they fix that by mucking around with the cable modem itself.
The cable modem itself is programmed by the company, in this case Rogers, with the IPs.
And here they're giving you ______.
Sorry.
And with the subscription, you're getting four IPs or five IPs.
And those IPs are the only traffic that you're going to receive as well as the ______.
Someone's got a call waiting coming in.
Yeah.
It's another one of those useless ______.
And in that way, it's difficult to do because on one side, you've got a piece of coax coming in.
And on the other side, you've got 10BaseT or whatever that goes in your machine.
Anyone out there that's ever done phone mods, no one in particular, Emanuel,
but can definitely be able to figure out how to do it.
It's not rocket science.
Cool.
I also just wanted to say, in reference to what was said at the beginning of the show about monitoring pager traffic,
I just think making that illegal is just total BS because, like you were saying, Emanuel,
it's just totally unencrypted stuff over radio waves.
And there's nothing wrong with scanning into that.
If people want to transmit confidential stuff over free radio waves, that's just stupidity on their part.
Yeah.
And the thing is, with all these news stories going out, not once did I see a warning given to people saying,
hey, when you page people, it's going out in clear text and anybody can read it.
That wasn't the issue.
The issue was that these people somehow violated privacy by turning on a radio.
Yeah.
All right. Thanks for calling.
Thanks. Bye.
Up in Canada Network, do you know anything about the laws up there as far as receiving radio transmissions?
Well, up here, receiving is not a problem, at least within the pager bands.
Up here, the pagers typically operate within one of two bands.
There's the standard 140X band.
And then now we've got actual 950 and up, 950 to 970, I believe.
I'm not a pager guy, but they still send the standard POCSAG encoded signal, and you can receive them.
Transmitting, however, is a whole other situation.
Yeah, that would be.
But there's no laws saying you can't listen to certain things?
I believe that the cell bands are protected, but I don't believe pagers are.
By protected, you mean it's just illegal to listen?
Yes.
Okay. Interesting.
All right, 212-279-3400, let's take another listener phone call.
Good evening, you're on the air.
Hi, how are you?
Okay. What's up?
I'm listening to your program.
There's a couple things I wanted to go over with you.
Okay.
Am I on the air right now?
Yes, you are.
Okay.
Turn down your radio a little bit.
Very cool.
A couple things.
First of all, I was listening to your ATM talk, and I wanted to discuss a few things.
First of all, there is slow-speed ATM being deployed throughout New Jersey and New York right now, such as a DS-1 rate.
Are you there?
Yeah.
Okay.
And it's considered ATM?
Yeah, it's DS-1 ATM.
However, with the header overhead and all that type of stuff, your unfortunate throughput is only around 1.1 megabits.
It's very similar to SMDS, but Bell Atlantic and 9X both have offerings in that rate.
Secondly, ADSL.
I run an ISP in northern New Jersey, and we are actually actively deploying that in the Spring United Territory.
Excellent.
So that is real, and it's coming.
Do you think it will be here within a year?
It's here now.
We're actually using two different products, one by Paragain, one by a company called Putt Systems, which is a rate-adaptive type.
It's actually RADSL.
It does up to, I think, 384 on over 20,000 feet.
We're using it in quite a few different areas, and it's actually working out quite well.
Also, there's one other comment that would make you think something about backbones not using ATM.
That's actually not quite true.
There's quite a few backbones.
Actually, I think you'd be hard-pressed right now to find a global backbone that's not using ATM.
All the big guys, such as U.Unet or PSI or Aegis or whoever else you want to look at, are generally using ATM switches for forwarding.
You'd be hard-pressed.
There's only one that I know of that's big.
It's not at Sprint, but they're using a different thing known as packet-over-sonnet, which is a little different, but it's interesting.
So I just wanted to clear up a few things, if I could help you.
What's the name of your provider?
We're NetAccess Corporation.
Ah, yes, you have some friends here, in fact.
Yeah, I thought I heard the name Emanuel.
I wasn't sure.
Yeah, I just wanted to let you know about that.
All right, well, thanks.
And you really think it will be here within a year?
Oh, definitely, definitely.
I don't know about in the city, because believe it or not, the hardest problem for ADSL right now is there's fiber in the way.
I know it sounds crazy, but it's true.
I mean, you're relying on the copper pair, and areas where they're deploying slicks or whatever is going to kill it.
But in the rural areas, we're doing quite well with it.
We have somebody who wants to say something to you.
Sure.
Alex.
Yeah, hold on.
Pavely is probably doing nothing.
Who is it?
Hit Pavely.
He's probably doing nothing.
Oh, I'm in the car right now.
Oh, POCSAG, definitely.
It would be terrible if they outlawed that, though.
It's fun to monitor.
It would be terrible if they actually outlawed that.
But I don't think currently.
The other guy was saying he wasn't sure, but I'm almost certain right now that it's not illegal to listen in to POCSAG traffic.
Actually, it is.
Oh, is it really?
Yeah, Congress made a law saying that.
I suggest you visit the website of Breaking News, www.breakingnews.com.
How recent was that?
There's a lot explained there.
Well, this happened last week.
Oh, really?
I think it was Wednesday.
They were busted for allegedly making fake pagers.
I don't know if that should be illegal, but certainly listening in should not be illegal.
I can't see that.
It doesn't make any sense.
I didn't realize it was.
I thought that was one of the few things you could still listen to.
Yeah.
All right.
Thanks for calling.
Thanks for the info.
No problem.
All right.
And, Fiber, I think I'll be buying you a hat.
I'll send you a 10-gallon hat.
How about that?
Yeah, I think we'll have to get the flavor you want.
Okay.
Okay, we're just about out of time.
Just about out of time here.
So, Network, any closing words, predictions, thoughts?
Well, I think ADSL is here.
It's certainly doing very well.
It's unfortunate that it's definitely going to, for my being concerned,
it's going to delay the implementation of a complete digital solution.
But, you know, given the price of the thing, it definitely works well here.
What can you think of something that might make the digital solution a bit more appealing?
Well, I think part of the problem is that with a full digital solution,
we're going to see a real, real broadening of our horizons in terms of communication.
And I think it's coming to the point where, you know, no one's seen it yet.
No one has figured it out yet, or at least no one has realized it.
Right.
Once we get a couple of those, you know, we'll bring it to you, AT&T type commercials,
you know, the company that will bring it to you, blah, blah, blah.
Right.
And I think people will start opening up to the idea that, hey,
this 640K connection is actually not enough,
and I need a gigabit to my bathroom or I'm not in with it.
Uh-huh.
Okay, well, we'll see where this goes.
Thanks very much for joining us and for updating us.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
Bye-bye.
Network from Ottawa telling us all about ADSL,
and we'll be following this story over the months and years ahead.
For FiberOptics, this is Emanuel Goldstein.
Good night until next week.
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I also pay my respects to the coalition commanders that I just met
and to the members of the armed forces that are here side-by-side with the United States,
armed forces from other countries, shoulder-to-shoulder,
and we are very grateful that this is a multilateral, not simply a unilateral, mission.
Our U.S. presence, of course, is the dominant one.
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And...
This is WBAI-FM in New York City, 99.5, where it is 9 o'clock.
Coming up now is Housing Notebook,
and we're dispensing with the regular theme music tonight
because we're going...
This may be the world premiere of this tune,
certainly the premiere on this station,
written by Stephan Smith
and performed by him with Patti Smith and Oliver Ray.
This is the ballad of Abner Luima.
Well, early one morning when the sun was down,
Flatbush part of New York town.
Oh, hello.
Oh, I...