Has anybody looked at the practicality of installing modem pools in each
telco switch location to grab the dialup user's traffic at the IP level
and then route it to their ISP of choice for authentication and further
routing. In other words, an ISP wouldn't buy phone lines, modems and
terminal servers, they would buy IP access ports.
The PTT in Israel tried doing something like this for a period of a month
before the government shut them down but they are planning on reopening
soon. A user dials the number 135 and gets connected to a Cisco t/s
in his area. One message unit per 5 minutes directly on the customers phone bill.
No authentication, no userid. The PTT stated that the
ISPs can sell services to the end user, such email boxes, Usenet
access, proxy services, etc. The PTT would run no server - just pure
IP level access.
The one hitch that was discovered was that hackers loved the system since
they did not have to identify themselves at an IP level. Israeli CERT teams
got lots of complaints from foreign systems about cracking attempts from
the PTTs dialup users. Since their phone systems and IP systems were
seperate, there was no handoff of the dialing phone number to the t/s
for recording as a traceback. They are now trying to reengineer the system
so as to have that capability. Anyone designing such a system should
take that into account.