Another thing that isn't made clear is one of the driving forces behind
this service: "the Silverdale problem".
Get out your map of Western Washington, and find Bremerton, Silverdale
(which may be hard...it's not a city but an "area"), and Poulsbo. West of
the Sound; east of Hood Canal (despite its name, a natural body of water).
Now...Silverdale is a local call to/from both Bremerton (and vicinity) or
Poulsbo (and vicinity, including "beyond" on the north end of the (Kitsap)
peninsula these places share. Bremerton and Poulsbo are long distance with
respect to each other.
Hence the ISPs settled in Silverdale to provide coverage. And the Internet
boomed, AND the area boomed, at the same time. Without the Internet,
USWest would still have had a "Silverdale problem".
USWest happily announced one new high capacity cable from Bremerton to
Silverdale a couple of years ago, claiming it would last two years. It was
plugged solid inside 3 months. They are busily adding interoffice
trunking...but this "leased modem" service is intended to move some of the
ISP traffic onto dedicated high capacity lines (more likely ATM) closer to
the dialup customer.
The test (with SilverLink, and perhaps others) mentioned in the story was
covered pretty thoroughly by the local press (in particular the Bremerton
Sun)
http://www.bremertonsun.com/
although I don't see a way to find the old stories online.
--John
-- John Baxter jwblist@olympus.net Port Ludlow, WA, USA Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish, and you get rid of him for the weekend. - To unsubscribe, email 'majordomo@livingston.com' with 'unsubscribe portmaster-users' in the body of the message. Searchable list archive: <URL:http://www.livingston.com/Tech/archive/>