ojai,
PacBell is a West Coast phone company. UUNET is the granddaddy of internet backbones. They spent $300M last year on infrastructure upgrades. UUNET is a cross country, industrial strength data carrier network used by many of the major corporations. In addition, they have major peering arrangements with other significant ISP's, so the odds of your internet signal getting a fast, reliable connection all the time is much better with UUNET than through your local provider.
Most of us have a local ISP who hooks up to a PacBell who routes messages to MAE-West (the biggest congestion point on the West Coast), then cross country on, maybe, Sprint's backbone which sends the data through other busy nodes to your desired destination.
Think of UUNET as a private, corporate network rather than a public (AT&T, SPRINT, MCI) network which is also dealing with smaller ISPs and voice calls. Because of their reliable service and near 100% uptime, they charge a fortune! Their dial-up ISDN is expensive: $25/month for 25 hours plus $2.00/hour afterwards. Full-time ISDN is only available in Canada. You can get full-time Frame/56KB for a mere $595/month!!! OUCH!
uunet.com |
