Ed Craig wrote:

...

A technique that often works well with recalcitrant phone companies around here (Oregon) is to complain of poor quality fax reception. For some reason, fax modems get more attention than computer modems when something's gone sour. Lately, most of the modems I've seen have been fax capable, so you'd only be stretching the truth a little, if at all. (For all I know, y'all do use your modems for faxing).

Complaining about bad fax service is the only way you can force the phone company to improve your line quality. It is an FCC regulation that all phone lines must be capable of 9600(?) baud fax service. This is the only rule that keeps the phone companies from switching to voice-only bandwidth lines. The big companies are lobbying congress to allow complete digitalization of the phone lines, which would allow them to sell voice-only service, and share 20 phones on a single analog line. Then fax lines, and modems will be an "extra service" and charged at a higher rate.

Eventually, to be fair to everyone, we will have to pay a "per megabyte" rate. That is we will pay for the amount of information transferred. Satellites are already setup like this.

So here in the US, we are "lucky" to have v.90 service and unlimited calling plans.

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YES you're really lucky, don't know what's to pay really big $$$ because you've stayed to many hours (an hour in spain is nearly 1'6$!) also the quality of servcice down here is awfully low, disconnects, bad data rates .... So I invite all the europeans to join the eurostrike for flat internet connection that takes place the 31th of january. Sorry for the offtopic . Vicente - To get out of this list, please send email to majordomo@suse.com with this text in its body: unsubscribe suse-linux-e Check out the SuSE-FAQ at <A HREF="http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/"><A HREF="http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/</A">http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/</A</A>> and the archiv at <A HREF="http://www.suse.com/Mailinglists/suse-linux-e/index.html"><A HREF="http://www.suse.com/Mailinglists/suse-linux-e/index.html</A">http://www.suse.com/Mailinglists/suse-linux-e/index.html</A</A>>