X.25 Pad [Telecom]

There are phone book listing for "Packet service public dial ports" in my phone book (Nova Scotia, "South Shore" book, area code 902):

The phone book entry for "DataPac" points to that entry. As these exist in the 543 exchange (small market town), I assume they exist in other Aliant exchanges as well.

For a year or two around 1990, I had VMS and Unix accounts at different universities but lived in a very rural place that had upgraded from party lines only a couple of years before. All the Uni accounts were long-distance calls. So I used DataPac for a couple of years, until our fledgling ISP finally provided a local-call dial port.

BH> ***** Moderator's Note ***** BH> BH> I'm not sure that there _are_ any more public X.25 networks, but if BH> there are, I think you'll need to start an account with one of them BH> before you dial into it. BH> BH> Bill Horne BH> Temporary Moderator

I had to open an account with the local telco and pay a monthly bill to use DataPac. But I've completely forgotten how the authentication worked.

Telenet and Tymnet both had public access numbers.... you could call in, connect to a remote address and it would bill the recipient if you didn't have an account.

I doubt there is any of this still operating. There might be some vestiges of Widanet out there somewhere. The internet killed the public switched data network a decade ago.

--scott

Because X.25 was far too slow and had far too much overhead (both bandwidth-wise and financial). There were encapsulations defined, even an entire class-A network set aside for "IP over PDN", but this approach was more expensive than building pure-IP networks, despite the capital costs. The fact that the PDNs, at least in the U.S., were locked into a model of charging for connect time and for each character made the costs look worse, and telco technologies like Frame Relay provided similar flexibility without the overhead.

-GAWollman

I just checked the Halifax phone book, they have 300, 1200, 2400 &

h.

Because they were slow as a pig, and because the whole point of the new ISPs is that you didn't need to have a long distance connection, you connected up to a local provider.

During the last bit of the BBS Revolution in the eighties, Telenet came out with a service called PC Pursuit which allowed you to use a local dial-in into a distant dial-out, over the X.25 framework, for a fairly reasonable price. But the Internet killed the need to call up distant BBSes.

Yes, that they DID do very well. But long distance rates fell, and the price of competing services fell, and then the internet took over.

--scott