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On 05/07/2013 22:34, Gordon Henderson wrote:
Blimey. FRIACO is a blast from the past! :) I also remember the aggravation of us having US Robotics modems and having to have a separate line to cater for k56flex customers.On Fri, 5 Jul 2013, Simon Avery wrote: *SNIP*Those were interesting times though. I remember Zynet having a physical PoPin Plymouth and, was it Truro? To allow customers in those cities the ability to pay local call rates...A few ISPs did this - and ran 64Kbps lines back to HQ. Stick a Livingston portmonster on it and 30 (not)modems sharing that 64K line... 0345 (now 0845) quickly provided a solution to that as all lines led to London (or Manchester) so the notion of a local dial-up POP was somewhat redundant. Finally FRIACO before ADSL roll-out became UK wide. I had a "Home Highway" aka ISDN line at home calling a single Demon FRAICO number to give me effectively a 64Kbps leased line - before I got higher speed Internet in this 3rd world county I'd moved to... (Came from Bristol where I had 512Kbps cable, woo hoo..)I was in Bristol at the time (mid 90's) and as part of the setup had a small bank of 4 (I think) real modems going into a multi-port serial card into a FreeBSD box... These lines were connected to telewest - and at the time TW (like all the cable co's) offered free local calls... They quickly cottonned onto it though, but those modems ran 24/7 for a good while...Gordon
I worked for Cabletel in South Wales (morphed into ntl: etc) and when I joined in '97 we were sending floppy disks out to customers with our software on and the letter gave a list of our PoP numbers with instructions to type in the one that gave the customer a local rate call. This did unfortunately lead directly to the most unpleasant call I had in my first few months, and it was on my first day. I won't bore you with the details but the customer was insistent we were *swear* useless, our service was *swear* useless, and our servers were always *swear* engaged, and what were we *swear* going to do about it?
Having investigated (he grudgingly allowed me to check his DuN dialer despite telling me there was nothing wrong with /his/ computer) the problem was located and I informed him that yes, you will get an engaged tone if you tell your modem to dial /your own number/ and not one from the list we gave you.
Julian -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq