mm wrote:
To alt.home.repair:

Did dial-up ever cause a shortage of phone lines? I never heard that,
but I am surprised if the phone companies had the capacity to fulfill
maybe a 50 to 300% increase in demand over the course of 10 years,
from soon after dial-up's startup to its peak. There are people who
spent maybe a half hour a day on the phone before the net, who must
have spent 12 hours a day on the phone/modem after the net. Combined
with all those who only used it for an hour extra, that's an enormous
increase.

When I first got dialup, there weren't that many ways to use the Net,
I didn't have that as many ways as one might have. So I was only on
an hour or two a day. And even when I got more uses, I tried to stay
on no more than maybe 3 hours to not tie up the phone lines. But I'm
sure most people are not that considerate.

A lot of people have gone to cable now, but there was a period were
20, 40, 80? million people had dial-up and they stayed on for hours
and hours, maybe all day. (Now that I know usage has slacked off, and
I've never heard of shortages, I've stayed on for 36 hours once, for
some reason I forget. And other days 12 hours.)

Cnversely, is there now a lot of excess capacity on phone-only lines,
now that many people have switched to cable? Doesn't even
switching to DSL end up using new central station hardware, leaving
old phone-only hardware unused?
Hi,
We're rather running out of numbers than line capacity(it's digital now)