It also does not cover telephone conversations passing through international lines or telephone metering, increasingly used by police to secure telephone records of the numbers dialled by suspects.

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Cable is cheaper and faster than phone lines, and more cable companies will also offer local telephone service.

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Yes Television (whose planned public offering was also scrapped recently) and Video Networks both deliver their services over telephone lines.

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The company also announced its ComQuest software, which allows a user to bind multiple analog telephone lines in order to increase the speed of browsing the Internet or downloading files.

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