Connectivity woes in Boston

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

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Michael Bilow wrote:
> The situation is a little more complicated than you paint it, I think.

It always is. The impressions I got from quite a number of people was
that  the  "failure"  of  ISDN  had  nothing  at  all  to do with its
technical merits.  The problem was  that  the  people  at  the  phone
company  couldn't tell you what kind of service to order, how to make
it work, or (most importantly) how much it would cost.

There were all the horror stories of people thinking they had ordered
a  low-bandwidth  service  for $20 or $40 per month, and then getting
billed $2000 per month. Such stories scared off a lot of people. They
sure  scared  me  off,  even though I was regularly using ISDN at the
places I worked.  I wasn't about  to  get  involved  with  a  lawsuit
against  the phone company with them billing me $2000 every month for
the years that it would likely take to get the courts to  decide  the
case (probably in the phone company's favor).

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