[LAU] Landlines, was Re: M/S EQ in Linux

[Joe Hartley]

On Sun, 15 Sep 2013 10:54:55 +0000
Fons Adriaensen <fons at linuxaudio.org> wrote:
> In the early years when I was working in radio we used temporary
> landlines for all live outside broadcasts. They usually went from
> the concert venue to the nearest transmitter site, where we had
> microwave links back to Brussels unless those were in use by the
> TV people. Audio quality was usually more than good enough for FM
> broadcasting, and they were quite reliable. I remember only one
> occasion when we had any trouble with them.  

Came to be the old radio geezer posting about the landlines for
remote broadcasts, see I'm beaten to the punch.

Jump ahead to my days of owning an ISP, and finding out that we could
install DSL modems on bare copper lines (aka alarm circuits), which were 
really, really cheap - until the telco caught on and stopped providing
us with those circuits, which was probably illegal, but when does that
ever stop big corporations??

> At some point we started experimenting with digital links based
> on multiple ISDN connections. Those were a nightmare, you couldn't
> trust them for more than five minutes. It took years before things
> were sorted out.

We then started provisioning ISDN circuits over Centrex, which eliminated
the prohibitively high cost per minute charges(*) since the customer was
considered a remote extension, and we paid by the mile away from one of
our locations.  It turned out that the telco (NYNEX, at the time) only had
one technician, Jose, that had any idea how these circuits were to be 
installed.  Unless he'd installed it, we knew the circuit wouldn't work
until such time that Jose could be dispatched.  We joked that NYNEX thought
ISDN stood for "I Still Don't kNow".

(*) We had one customer insist that they'd pay less money by going with
an on-demand ISDN line that only connected when there was traffic, and would
pay by the minute.  They flipped when they got their first bill, as it was 
huge,  They screamed at us until I proved that the traffic was caused by a
Windows server that they had which would send some packets back to the
Microsoft mothership every 5 or 10 minutes.  They changed over to the
dedicated line after that.

-- 
======================================================================
       Joe Hartley - UNIX/network Consultant - jh at brainiac.com
 Without deviation from the norm, "progress" is not possible. - FZappa