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I've been very impressed lately with the frequency and size of donations from businesses/corporations:

Microsoft donated [www.microsoft.com] $5M in cash to United Way in NY, $5M in licenses/support/tech help.

Sprint has donated [www.sprint.com] handsets and redirected a cell from NJ to NYPD. They've also provided phones for city, state and local government officials and to the American Red Cross for use in recovery efforts.

GE has pledged $10 million to a fund that will assist the families of the firefighters, police officers and emergency rescue personnel who perished while responding to the attack on the World Trade Center. [from www.ge.com]

AT&T has donated [www.att.com] $1M to American Red Cross and $10M in prepaid calling cards.

Verizon has offered [newscenter.verizon.com] free local calling to and from payphones on Manhattan streets.

I'm sure there are many more. As I look at Amazon's donation center, it looks like it's going up at about $4000/min.

This makes me proud to be an American.

It seems as though there's a trend brewing in the residential/small business broadband/*dsl markets. Maybe people are realizing real business requires frame relay, OC lines, etc...

Of course... it could all stem from the tactics used by monopolies to rub out competitors. who knows...

If you look at the cost breakdown of a multi-company service, you'll find that the carrier makes the bulk of the money. I have DSL at home, and I found that of the $50 per month that I pay, the carrier (Verizon) gets $35 of it, and my ISP (Acecape, who I highly recommend) gets the other $15.

AOLTW really has nothing to worry about here -- if anything, it means they get a good sized chunk of lucrative wholesale business. And they picked a good bunch of partners -- companies like Earthlink pride themselves on providing little more than raw connectivity: a market segment which has very little intersection with AOL's customer base. The typical AOL customer is unsophisticated and wants to have his/her hand held through the entire online experience.

Possibly most important of all is that this arrangement conveniently excludes Microsoft from the picture. MSN is the biggest threat to AOL right now, and since AOL is one of the few companies left that can hold its own against Microsoft, seeing them remain strong is vital to the industry, whether you use/like their services or not.
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One concession that Covad cashed in on was payments under Performance Assurance Plans. "Under the Performance Assurance Plans, we are held financially responsible for faulty loop provisioning. Covad abused these plans. Using their bogus trouble tickets, Covad received inflated payments and rebates," said Barr.

--Blair

Originally, POTS (plain old telephone service) was delivered out of COs (central offices) with a twisted pair going to each customer. This is known as the local loop and typically covered a 3 mile radius from the CO. As switches became saturated and neighborhoods/businesses sprang up further from the CO, the question of how to deliver POTS to these outlying areas came up. Building more COs at several million $ each was not cost effective.

This dilemma was very much like the xDSL problem the telcos are faced with today with DSLAMS that extend 15-18 kft. The solution to the original local loop problem is also the solution to the xDSL loop limit. In the case of POTS, DLCs (digital loop carriers) are used to extend the reach of the CO by placing remote terminals just about anywhere -- as long as you can feed that terminal with copper or fiber (and their inherent distance limitations).

DLCs have evolved into an alphabet soup of features and acronyms (NGDLC, MSAP, IMAP, etc). The current IMAPs (integrated multiservice access platform) deliver nearly any type of analog or data service over copper, fiber, and RF.

So, with an IMAP, VZ can deliver that xDSL service (which is ATM-based) over copper or fiber or RF. In this configuration, the DSLAM is pushed out to the remote terminal. There's no reason ATM traffic can't be transported over copper -- it happens all the time! The challenge is having the equipment to handle the conversion between electrons and photons (among other things). If you can put that equipment (hardened) in a remote terminal, then the sky's the limit as long as the customer is within the range of the remote terminal.

If you want to know more about this, check into SBC's Project Pronto. SBC has selected two DLC/IMAP vendors (AFC & Alcatel) to provide equipment for a digital overlay. Verizon is reported to be very interested in AFC's xDSL solution (essentially a DSLAM on a card), as well. Another good source for the technically curious is WebProForum.

I signed up with Verizon DSL (768 down/128 up) in October 2001. In about 25 days I had a working connection, and to date I would estimate the downtime as virtually zero (maybe an hour or two in 6 months). My connection speeds are usually in the 700 - 800 kbps range during the day, going up as high as 870 kbps during off-peak hours. Upload speeds are consistently in the 130 kbps range. Packet loss is zero. Latency is decent enough that I can play (and serve) UT games without problems. I couldn't be happier.

But you must consider that my apartment is on one side of the block, and on the other side is the CO. Distance means a lot with DSL, and (if the houses weren't there) an athetically inclined person could throw a baseball from my window and hit the CO.

Also, I am using a local ISP with great bandwidth. I pay a little bit more than if I had gone with Verizon as my ISP, but I welcome the chance to support the few remaining independent ISPs.

So that is my experience (a great one!). When people are knocking DSL, remember that not everyone has had a bad time with it.

NeoPoint has had a cell/PDA, the NP1000, out for a while now with Sprint. They are releasing the NP2000 in time for Christmas. The NP1600 is out with Verizon now... I like being able to carry only one device to keep my phone numbers and my appointments, surf the web and call people. It's just so much simpler. It has T9 to make typing easier (it guesses the word you are trying to spell instead of having to hit the 6 key three times for an O etc.). And it syncs with outlook, notes etc. to keep me up to date. I won't go back to two separate devices. 8-)

Well, maybe they're everything you want, they're everything you need, they're everything inside of you that you wish you could be....

But actually, Verizon is a merger of the wireless divisions of Bell Atlantic and GTE. And the name's supposed to be "true horizon." Check out their FAQ if you're interested.

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