ISP phone ratio's and Interoffice trunkage for voice

[mikebw@bilow.bilow.uu.ids.net (Mike Bilow)]

  James Love wrote in a message to Mike Bilow:
  
   JL>      If an ISP has rather predictable traffic, and lots of
   JL> lines, isn't  that cheaper to deliever that lots of two wire
   JL> copper wires?  There would  seem to be huge economies of
   JL> scale... particularly if fiber is deployed. Doesn't the new
   JL> higher levels of demand drive down unit costs? 
  
  No one really knows.  On the one hand, NYNEX opted to install the fiber link at
  their expense, so there must be some reason they did so.  On the other hand,
  NYNEX was also legally obliged to keep putting in POTS business lines as long
  as the ISP kept paying for them.  The largest copper bundle currently in use
  here is 1200-pair, and I doubt that NYNEX is putting in any new such cable.
  
  If you order 100 Centrex lines, you are considered by NYNEX to be a pretty good
  customer, and you get salesmen who bow down and worship you.  This suggests
  that the installation must be fairly profitable.
  
  When I was at the University of Rhode Island, we only had 50 lines for our own
  switch and about 3000 extensions.  (There were an additional 2000 dormitory and
  residence extensions which traversed the university's switch, but which used
  additional capacity rented from the university by NYNEX.  The university did
  not provide telephone service to students.)  As with the University of Texas,
  data lines eventually started to claim the entire DID capacity, so they were
  segregated off into their own block.  I was appointed to the Academic
  Computational Advisory Committee, whose major project was to network the campus
  by 1981, then by 1983, then by 1987...
   
  -- Mike