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You seem to be confused. When the RBOC's were broken up, PacBell was part of Pacific Telesis (along with Nevada Bell), and SNET was independant. Verizon does indeed own GTE. Accurate information here.

In the US, this obligation applies to every telco anyway, under FCC regs, but the filed tariffs aren't online, only displayed in the FCC library IIRC.

Verizon publishes their tariffs online.

The NYS Public Service Commission also publishes tariffs of some of the utilities they regulate online, although Verizon's are not currently among those available.

By law, you can always obtain a copy of any publicly-regulated utility's tariff. Contact the utility or your state's PSC, PUC, or other regulator. If not available online, you should be able to receive information through the mail. Since when has "online" become the yardstick of availability?

Mark

I do now notice that Thawte seems to have become a Verisign company. Also GTE Cybertrusts page http://www.cybertrust.gte.com/ seems too barebones for a commercial entity. Seems like verisign is the only choice remaining when it comes to full compatiblity?

He doesn't, which was the point of his "Ask Slashdot." There are many apartment owners in the North Texas area who sign deals with CLECs giving them exclusive access to their buildings for telecom services, for a suitable fee (of course). In these instances, you cannot get DSL from your localtelco unless your CLEC wants to permit it and you can get the localtelco bureaucracy to move in that direction. Also, DSL from another CLEC is virtually out, since they don't want the hassle.

Simply put, if you're going to move, make sure your apartment has the features you want: location, price, amenities and the right phone company.

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I have a fractional T1 service... but "fractional" can mean a lot of different speeds, and in my case it's only 128 kbps. It is expensive to set up a T1 service, but at least in Portland Oregon, it's not quite as bad as you make it out to be.

The most expensive part is the upstream service from an ISP. Most ISPs are quite expensive. I did quite a bit of searching in my area, and I found two with competitive prices. I went with Internet Arena, because the other was some christian place with filtering at their router, and we've all heard about how well filtering software works.

Not far behind the ISP is the telco. In my area, it's GTE. A year ago their prices were lower... it seems strange that they're increased. Unlike the ISP, at least where I live, you're stuck with your local telco. The service is Frame Relay. In Oregon, and probably in many other places, there's no room for a bargain, since the rates are set by a utility commission.

Of course, you then need equipment. I wanted a low cost Linux based solution. At the time, the only real option was Sangoma. They sell a card that goes in your PC that more or less does everything you need. The mounting bracket has one 8 pin jack (same size and shape as an 10baseT ethernet connector) but it's for a T1 line. Like ethernet, only four wires are used, a pair for transmit and a pair for receive. I'll give more details about the wiring below. You can always email me if you're trying to set it up and have a question.

Indeed it is expensive. I don't recall all the costs down to the penny, but here's more or less how it worked out:

• Setup: Samgoma card, $950
• Setup: Telco install fee, $350
• Reoccur: Telco, $123
• Reoccur: ISP, $150

Now I could go on about why I decided to spring for an expensive T1 service, but that's really getting off-topic from and already slightly off-topic post. The main point of this post was to respond with the actual costs of setting up a low speed fractional T1 service.... or at least the actual costs in my area, as they were about a year ago. A secondary purpose was to give a little bit of info about how to do it. To that end, I'll ramble on just a bit more about the setup.

I called both the ISP and the telco and asked about how to set things up. My experience was that it's better and easier to deal with the ISP. Finding a cool ISP is not easy, but they're out there. Dave at Internet Arena is a great guy, so if you're in the Portland area, I'd suggest you give Dave a call. He's got a bunch of other really high speed/moderate cost options for certain areas, using leased T1 lines instead of the telco. Anyway, the point is to talk with ISPs and make a visit to any you want to do business with.

Often times the ISP will call the telco for you to set up all the details, but you can get involved if you want. I did. Each T1 line has a circuit ID number. Your new service will get a number. When you hear your new number, be sure to write it down and don't lose it. You may never need it again, but it's a pain to find someone at the telco who knows enough to look it up if you ever have a problem with the line.

Frame Relay is a protocol, much like the ethernet 802.3 frames. Like IPv4 gives 32 bit IP addresses, frame relay provides DLCI numbers. Unlike IP, a DLCI number is a short integer which is unique only on your line. The phone company establishes Permanent Virtual Connections (PVC) through the frame relay network, by adding routes and doing who knows what else. Ultimately, the PVC will link a DLCI number (short integer) on your your circuit ID (big long number) to a DLCI number on the ISP's circuit ID. You'll probably never use the circuit ID number, but you do need to know the DLCI number to set up the sangoma card.

Since I bought my card, Sangoma has made some major improvements in the setup process (I set up another card for someone a couple months ago). The installer looks a lot like RedHat's text based installation program. It will ask you about for various bit of information, and it'll want to know about each DLCI you have. You'd probably only establish one PVC to your ISP, but it's possible to have lots of PVC to other people, all running on the same line. After the installation, each PVC will appear as an interface. I named mine "fr16", and it looks like this when I run ifconfig:

fr16 Link encap:Frame Relay DLCI HWaddr 4096
inet addr:207.149.244.8 P-t-P:207.149.244.1 Mask:255.255.255.224
UP POINTOPOINT RUNNING MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:4889031 errors:0 dropped:12 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:7655668 errors:136874 dropped:51 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:10
Interrupt:7 Base address:0x360 Memory:c00de000-c00dffff

From here it's just the usual linux routing things.

Well, that's probably enough rambling on. If anyone reading this is looking to set up a T1 service on linux, on a budget, hopefully this has helped a bit instead of just creating more confusion. It's not cheap, but also not as bad as some people make it out to be.

There is a new patch with some bug fixes, located at this link: Unreal Tournament Linux Patch.

GTE makes systems similar to this. They aren't Tempest shielded (the systems sit in metal shelters on the back of Hummers -- when the doors are closed on the shelters, the systems are Tempest protected), but they are called 'ruggedized'. Basically, this means these things can sit out in the desert in all the dust and have no problems. One came back from the field with a cup full of sand and it's not uncommon to find rocks in them. The systems can operate after being dropped (just don't drop them on anything you like, they are -way- heavy) and they can operate while being bounced around. One of the cool things is that these are high end systems. Ultra 2's and 10's with major memory and disk space. Basically, they're decent systems designed for harsh environments (the Army's battlefield, for instance).

More info at: http://chs2.gte.com/product.htm

check it out. They've got a "low cost device" to open up the cable networks. And @home is pissed about it! So maybe sometime in the nearish future we could see some cable compitition... perhaps someone could interpret?

We've heard the promises before of high bandwidth. Will it ever materialize? Not unless the people who want/need it start letting cable, telephone, and other companies know its needed, and there's large amounts of motivation for the utilities to provide it. I live in an area serviced by GTE and I recall them stating that they are rolling out ADSL based the on customer demand. Sure. What I've seen so far is that they are in college towns/cities deploying DSL. That makes little sense, because almost anyone in those towns can go into the college and get what they need in a lab. How many college towns do you know of where there's two or less ISPs? There's an awful lot of people begging anyone for bandwidth. The telcos complain that they are losing money and in danger of their networks failing because of all the people who have more than one line so they can access the Internet. Duh. Give us real bandwidth and then your problems go away! All this beating around the bush is so the telephone companies can make money with all their fees for second/third/etc. lines. Folks, it's time to let your telco/cable co./ISP/etc. know you're tired of this stuff. Contact them, contact your public utilities commissions, contact your representatives, contact the Federal Commnications Commission, and get them to do something. Maybe if the people in government gave these companies a tax cut with the stipulation that they must provide high-bandwidth in a certain size area in a certain amount of time, the utilities would get up and get going.

Then again we all know that it's the Utilities Mafia (there is no Utilities Mafia [tm]) that's behind this.

I hate to break it to you, but Pac*Bell is the best of the RBOC's (the baby bells), nationwide, according to my friends who run national ISPs. Be glad you don't live in NYNEX or GTE territory.

The real problem is that legacy telephone companies are so invested in voice telephony and circuit switching that packet switching is a mystery to them. They Don't "Get It." They can generally be trusted to run wires or give you a point-to-point bit-pipe (i.e. a dedicated leased line), but never ask them for a switched data service (e.g. frame relay, ATM, SMDS) because they'll always fuck it up. ISDN is a borderline case, because it looks and smells like voice to them, but it has never been tariffed (priced) correctly: ISDN calls should have the same price as voice calls.

There was an article in Wired a while ago called, The NetHeads versus The BellHeads which described some of this cluelessness, and how Internet companies are eating the RBOCs and other LECs alive.

If you're looking for xDSL service, best to go with one of the Competitive LECs, e.g. Covad, or NorthPoint, because it's a lead-pipe cinch that your RBOC will hose up the Internet part of xDSL, even if they get the basic bit-pipe right.

The City of Stockholm, Sweden got it right - they laid down dark fibre all over the city, and then set up a city-owned corporation to lease it out to all comers. This makes it easy to get really high speed data service at low prices. Right on the edge of the Silicon Valley, the City of Palo Alto, California has the same opportunity (i.e. they've laid down the dark fibre) but they're hesitating to actually use it! (idiots)

Just want to clarify that secure computers can be connected via public networks (WAN's). This requires the use of encryptors that are stategically placed where the classified and unclass networks connect.

For some info see this example

Choose one that support the Macintosh.