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Houston DSL users File Lawsuit Against SBC
cprincipe writes "According to this story on Yahoo, Houston DSL customers of SBC Communications have filed a lawsuit alleging that SBC has intentionally lowered connection speeds to its customers. " SBC, it should be noted, is the parent of Southwestern Bell, and recently acquired Ameritech.
One not on the Verizon equipment (GTE) for the CO. They do not properly set the FECN/BECN bits on the frame/atm network. As such, we have had to do bandwidth shapping of our transmit side of the network in order to make sure we don't over-run the speed that a has ordered. Unfortunately, that means that if a customer upgrades his service and forgets to tell us, he doesn't see any improvement....
I might be considered a different case. I am a power user (see my Windows 2000 Geek of the Week page), and I used to have a 56K modem connecting to Worldspy (which I'd connect to using Dial-Up Networking [my typing teacher found a way to get around the laggy Java client]). When Worldspy was gobbled up by Juno, I was left with no ISP and no choice but to get a high speed connection. I could have used cable, but I didn't because hundreds of people in my town jumped on the RoadRunner bandwagon (I know firsthand: I work at CompUSA, and they ask me where the network cards are [some of them don't even know what a network adapter is]). My friend has it, and he reports that it bogs down to 10k per second. I then looked at DSL. It was 384 to 640kbps (translates to a peak of 60k per second), and the substation is just down the street. I ordered it and set it up (during the strike, I might add). I connected it to my Linksys router, and now I experience constant rates: 60k per second download, 11k per second upload. And it never deviates from that (unless, of course, the server at the other end is slow; many of those mp3 ftp servers are just K6-2 machines!). I chose DSL over cable because it meant freedom from the TimeWarnerAOLMediaOneAT&T conglom-o.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
PPPoE is only used because the Radius Authentication system was already in wide use. The DSL connections are already PVC's, so you could implement a direct connection system if you wanted. You could even use a /30 subnet mask on the connection to mandate ONLY 1 IP would be available.
With the advent of IPMASQ, trying to limit to a single IP address is a loosing proposition.
Would it be posible to sue them for failure to install?? It's been 5 phone calls and I have not even seen a human being yet. With all the agravation I am going through just to GET DSL, I better recieve everything I am paying for. OH and god forbid I have my machine on a network when they show up! then they will charge me 69.95 a month instead of the 39.95 basic rate. never mind if I am not asking them to connect the other machines..................
Dirty Pirate Hooker
sorry, bad link. Here's my Geek of the Week page
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Hmmm. This reminds me of the situation in Denmark, where I live. Ameritech recently acquired a large portion of "Tele Danmark", the company which was once the only telecommunications company here. Right now, they sit on all the copper, and when other companies wants to offer DSL lines, they have to go through a check with Tele Danmark to see if there is enough raw copper on the address - since Tele Danmark doesn't do shared copper, unless it is on their own DSL lines. Short story is, I tried to get a DSL line from World Online, and they said, no - not enough copper on that address, on account of World Online having to use _another_ copper-line just for the DSL-data. Sucks, man! And to make it worse, I waited 2 months for the answer! Tele Danmark (Ameritech) delivers the whole package in a week! :)
So, is Ameritech/SBC really a Microsoft company?
When do you see the Sun God "Ra"? I'm Glaswegian, and (almost)every morning I leave my house to travel to work at 8.20, it rains. Have you read 'So long, and thanks for all the fish'? Imagine the rain god in it, that's me. Keep your eyes open though, if it stops raining in September, it's because I've moved to Switzerland, and the rain has followed me.
sulli
sulli
RTFJ.
I've been using RR in Houston since the "beta test" (a bit over a year...) and when it's working, it's great. The upstream sucks, but it's sufficient. The downstream on the other hand is very good.
/really/ 100x faster, because then I could upload family videos or whatever to relatives in a timely manner. Sure, I'd use it for warez too, but there are legitimate uses for a fast upstream connection. Stuck at 20kBps tops for now, I suppose :/
However, my area (I'm in northwest Houston) has experienced frequent (at best (least) once a month, usually more), unexplained outages. This isn't just me and my line integrity, it's everyone within a 5 mile radius that I know has RR.
These last two days it has been on and off every 5-15 minutes. The cable light has gone off twice^H^H^H^Hhree times since I started this post. And all I can get is "let's restart your modem" or "Well, we're not showing an outage in your area" or whatever. It sucks. The tech support is pointless but, thankfully, pretty friendly and willing (if you bitch, of course) to give you some sort of refund on your bill.
Getting DSL here now is impossible. We've tried at work to get some sort of broadband solution but we can't get anyone to get us service in a timely manner. So I guess SBC is a little overloaded...
My whole feel on broadband providers is they don't care too much about the customer, just the customer's money. They're way too willing to take your money, but not very willing to back their claims up. I wish my internet connection was
-tsunake
On the suit, though, did they ever advertise guaranteed throughput for news?
sulli
sulli
RTFJ.
I've NEVER heard of a satisfied bell atlantic customer ... from the simplest pots installs to high bandwidth circuits they still can't get their act together -- I just assume all telcos suck equally.
I don't know, if you manage to pull 128kB out of a 2400baud modem, I'd think that's pretty damned impressive :)
With this in the news, soon on its heals should be a class action complaint agains Pacific Bell. They continue to advertise, but delays are commonly 2 months before it's up and running. Often they can't deliver the speed (because they don't tell you up front you have to be close to a switch or something.) And often screw up peoples computers.
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
--
--
Just as a test I did a ftp session to ftp.kernel.org (zeus.kernel.org) and did some transfers and this is what I got.
get linux-2.4.0-test6.tar.bz2
local: linux-2.4.0-test6.tar.bz2 remote: linux-2.4.0-test6.tar.bz2
200 PORT command successful.
150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for linux-2.4.0-test6.tar.bz2 (18106527 bytes).
226 Transfer complete.
18106527 bytes received in 122 secs (1.5e+02 Kbytes/sec)
That's what I expect 1.2Mbps download speed, so as you can see it's not an all 128k cap on everything.
-- Ed Bugg --You have freedom of choice, but not of consequences.--
Eh? Am I missing something wrong with my post?
Nice caps though... they're really, uh... big!
http://windows.scares.us
Not necessarily. Some gateway routers (e.g. Redback) can be configured to only allow one IP per location. I think PPPoE is really for authentication of another sort (more accountability for abuse) but I've always thought that the user experience is too much of a pain. Authentication is useful, but if a customer is abusing the service, you can always kill their line at the gateway.
sulli
sulli
RTFJ.
sulli
sulli
RTFJ.
SWBell is advertising "up to 384 Kbps rates," but if you are never capable of achieving the advertised rates, then that is illegal, just as if SWBell advertised "up to 150 Mbps transfer." If you advertise a something, there must be a reasonable expectation of being able to achieve that.
--
Ben Kosse
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Ben Kosse
Remember Ed Curry!
Yes, but it is much more difficult to distinguish by TCP application at the ATM client device, typically a dumb bridge. You can, and some carriers do, prioritize "business" over "individual" traffic, but this is by PVC, not by application (NNTP/SMTP/HTTP/Napster).
sulli
sulli
RTFJ.
The Central Office is defined by the location of the DSLAMs, the devices that bridge between your phone line and a backbone. Without the use of repeaters, this is probably within 20 000 feet of yout home. DSLAM-digital subscriber line access multiplexer
A child of five could understand this. Fetch me a child of five.
Here's what their Chairman, Iain Vallance has to say about it all, as recently as November '99, from a speech to the TMA reported by ZDNet:
You'll forgive me for swearing. Words fail me.
The article lacked detail. It'd be useful to know how many people were affected, for how long and the impact.
It does beg the question - how many telcos are covertly operating a sub-standard service, hoping nobody will notice?
Perhaps all telcos should provide open source, impartial network monitoring software in order to self-regulate the quality of service. In Britain we have a telco watchdog that would stomp all over this thing.
Rob.
TV signals are analog and usualy not subject to error correction. data trafic is another beast all together. plus, yes my cable has looked crappy for no good reason on ocasion. With the penny pinching TimeWarner has shown up to now, how far do you think they will segment their network? Not very far if the cost is going to surpass the complaint factor.
Dirty Pirate Hooker
I would imagine they will loose this case on the simple fact that the bandwidth is not being limited on their line, but on connectivity to the servers. The SWBell servers are throttling the speed which has nothing to do with the DSL service. Therefore, the complaintents have no case, because SWBell makes no service guarantee on the speed of their internal servers, only the DSL line itself. Specificly, they only guarantee the speed of the DSL line internally and not the internet connectivity itself.
My roommate and I have Pac-Bell DSL up in Davis, and I haven't noticed any slow down. It's been staying up pretty well and although all the guys on their install crew smoke crack, if you know how to fix their work and clean up your phone line, you can get good speed. I just tried to see what kind of bandwidth I was getting and at 00:21 on a saturday night, I got 127K/s using ncftp3 to ftp from zeus.kernel.org.
I'm currently in the process of finding housing in the East Bay, and will probably end up getting a loop from covad or northpoint, and then going with the ISP of my choice (Read: whoever has the best network when I get my DSL) for DSL. It'll cost more, but that'll more than make up for the few times I did have to call pac-bell. When the service is up it's good, just hope you don't have to call them.
-ssd
You had napkins? Lucky. We had to write on our hands.
For those of you who have never had to deal with SBC, be advised that for those of us who have, this is no surprise at all.
Southwestern Bell has always sucked, sucks, and will always suck barring saturation atomic bombing of their corporate headquarters.
They suck worst in Oklahoma, where they are deliberately punishing the state for Bob Kerr rolling them over to the FBI for attempting to bribe him. The forms this punishment takes includes things like $150 a month ISDN BRI, $4700+ a month ISDN PRI, etc. (ISDN rates in urban areas are lower, but still unreasonable.)
So now they suck on DSL too? Gee, imagine that.
Every home I ever lived in in SBC territory, I had to rip out all their wiring and redo it myself if I wanted more than 16,800 baud on my connections.
They suck.
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Right now I am pricing the options to offer DSL service to members, and having a difficult time finding DSL circuit providers that are not overselling their own internal (ATM/FR) bandwidth from the central offices themselves.
Unfortunately, real bandwidth costs real money, a true T1 connection without any artificial restrictions will run you around $1,500.00 in most major US cities, not counting the cost of the circuit itself. When you pay a DSL provider $49.95 a month, you aren't going to be getting dedicated access to $1,500 worth of bandwidth!
A for-profit ISP has to keep their average customer happy (Slashdot readers are not their average customer), pay the monthly recurring cost for the support personnel, rent, DSL and T1/T3 circuits and bandwidth to the Internet, pay off the initial capital expense, and eventually turn a profit. They have no choice but to cut corners and oversell bandwidth.
At most, you get what you pay for.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
From SBC's DSL page: "Note: Service and speed options not available in some areas. Minimum connection speed or "sync-rate" (384Kbps or 1.5Mbps) is guaranteed between customer location and serving central office. Connection speeds may be higher under optimal conditions. Actual data transfer or throughput may be lower than sync-rate due to Internet congestion, server or router speeds, protocol overheads, and other factors that cannot be controlled by SBC Companies." Read: Your line is guaranteed at 384kbps downstream, but once it hits the router, tough shit (that's been my experience anyway).
>It's not how big a pipe you have, it's how you use it.
thats what everybody with a small _pipe_ says...
:-)
Where I'm at, roadrunner gives me very good speeds, and is much more cost effective then dsl. I've hit 300k/s from sunsite.unc.edu before, and typicly get over 100k/s from good sites. Also you can put as much machines as you want behind the cable modem, just don't let TW know about it (what buisness is it of theirs anyway). The only real problem I see with road runner is rules against running servers.
can only hope that some fool who made the decision (if they in fact did so) put it in writing.
but i see your point - the chance of punishing SBC is slim as far as guilt. but this appears to me to be what most class actions suits are about: media attention. and of course, media attention could negatively effect their bottom line.
/* Half alive and half dead too, work is for suckers and the sucker is you. - "Half-life" by Local H*/
I wonder if Spam has anything to do with throttleing the traffic on SMTP and NNTP traffic.
I use a third party NNTP provider, and would not be happy to have my paid for NNTP access throttled in that way {though I DO understand if spam prevention is part of the reason for the throttleing).
This also makes me wonder how long it would be before the commercial NNTP providers start advertising "Get around NNTP blocks, connect to us on ports 119, 2000-30000" {kind of like what AOL had to do to allow its IM clients to connect through firewalls and other network blocks}.
--
Amarillo Linux Users Group
--
Time is on my side
Everytime I read some news now there's a new lawsuit. It seems to go hand in hand, technology equals lawsuit. A small few get in control of the technology, abuse (or not) and then those that rely on it need to sue for what they need (or sometimes what are totally unrealistic demands). There needs to be some system other than suing in place to ensure no abuse by large corporations. Suing takes way too long to get anything done and if it's really important goes through courts for years and usually gets dismissed at one level.
--- I used to moderate, then I read the -1 articles and decided having to filter through them was not worth it.
Two more BT stories, for those unconvinced that BT is a useless greedy and - in its current form - ultimately doomed entity:
A report of further delays to ADSL roll-out: BT delays ADSL again, Freeserve says it's a 'disgrace' . "BT claims it could not get enough people to take part in the trial". That is such a bullshit claim. I know tech journalists and techhies in metropolitan areas who were turned away by BT when they asked to take part in the ADSL trial. That would be the same ADSL I saw being trialled in the US in 1995.
A longer ZDNet editorial on tryanny of BT
Lest we are left in any doubt about what we are dealing in. BT made circa £4billion profits last year, equal to £66 profit per head of the UK population.
When you call to complain, all they say is that they can only guarantee your DSL line speed, not the speed of another site. They repeat that when you say that your friend with a T1 (well, works at an ISP with one) can download at 140 KB/sec give or take, while I get 12 KB/sec.
At any rate, the suit appears to be over the fact that they signed you into a contract, then changed their side while offering no compensation. In my opinion, this lawsuit is well justified and overdue.
funny munging
This is exactly why another group in a different area needs to bring the same kind of suit against SBC. Then all the partys involved need to make sure that Wall Street knows about the problem. SBC will not do a damn thign unless they are forced by the FCC, courts or upset stock holders. There is nothing that will get a large company moving faster than their stock price going down for a reason they can pinpoint.
Its about time these idots learn that if they advertise "internet access" that means full tcp/ip including server. They can limit bandwidth to servers on shared media like cable but they can't simply say "no servers" because that isn't "Internet Access".
/me wonders if it's from being an extra 10000+km from our parents :)
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
It's not how big a pipe you have, it's how you use it.
sulli
RTFJ.
well, one of the problems you get is the tiered structure of DSL industry. I live in a black hole for bandwidth in san jose, I get crappy dial up - no cable modem, and VERY slow dsl.
I had to wait over a year for IDSL prices to drop to an affordable rate, I pay $50./mo for 144/144 sycronous (sp?) - I get between 3 and 20k dload speeds.
I cant switch providers, as Pac Bell provides the physical wire, Covad provides the cicuit, and flashcom provides the "service".
fortunatley - I can afford the 50/mo to get just bareley out of dial-up hell. Any other DSL provider will be in the same structure - circuit will prolly be covad's so no matter where I go, I cant get any better. (i live 24,000 ft. from the co - and i am not yet ready to move just for bandwidth)
I'm moving.
Of course BT could have done it years ago, they had the tech and they definitally had the money, but would have lost a lot on leased line rentals and ISDN.
~ppppppppö
Ah. To be lucky and not even know it. 28.8 all day long . . .
Heh, @home cable services is just the same, i dual boot between linux and windows and have called on both instances and they seem to be more friendly when you call them when you're using linux, if you are using windows during that time, then they'll ask you stupid questions like is your ethernet plugged in, can you move your mouse to the bottom left and left mouse button click, etc. When i ask them in linux, they'll just ask me to ping and traceroute =].
Of course, once i had someone get totally anal because i was using linux, they're like 'oh we don't support it.' That time i wanted their dns/gateway servers and i was so fed up i just asked for another person, of course he didn't let me, so i just called again and they happily gave it to me, didn't even ask for my address, etc too.
The best time was someone that knew what the hell he was talking about and asking me to check ifconfig, so i guess it depends on who you talk to, some people know what they're doing, others are ignorant....
Only 3 Megabit is pathetic.. Even 3 Megabyte is pathetic.. 3 MB *ever* ?? What does that work out to expressed in Mbps ? ;-))
--
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
Even if they could, though, and there was good competition, you'd probably get raked over the coals for setup fees if you switched. I got nailed pretty hard when Covad ran their line to my house (They may have had to run copper though, since I'm out in the middle of nowhere.) If those setup fees are the norm, I wouldn't want to switch DSL providers on a regular basis.
Fortunately I'm happy with Covad/Speakeasy and don't plan to switch anytime soon.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Finally, a reporter who understands why people need DSL. :-)
Attempt to dodge off-topicness: 128k is pathetic for DSL, isn't it? I doubt they can win a suit, but good luck to them.
Ever hear of oversubscription? Each customer isn't going to use the whole line all the time, so it's acceptable to put more customers on the line than you can support (to a point).
Also, instead of lining their pockets, the executives might want to spend money buying another T3. It would be good for their business in the long run.
3MB/*ever*
To mathematicalasise it.
~ppppppppö
In my contract with SWB for home DSL, they do not guarantee the service or available bandwidth.
Here's the secret to getting a real external dsl 'modem'. Tell the provider that you are planing to use the service with a usb-less laptop.
------- Oh damn.... the Sigfile escaped... -Great OM
SAVE SLASHDOT
Someday I'll make devildog.org into something.
Someday I'll make
IANAL,
The problem is most Public Utility Commisions (PUCs) which are charged with keeping the phone company in line really have to look at what the tarrif says. They really aren't charged with looking at marketing.
For instance, U S WEST, now QWEST, originally filed DSL as being 640K down and 256K up (Note, this was at a state level, with the FCC they filed 256K both ways). However, read closely this is an UP TO speed. The actual minium rate is 1K.
The phone company may be able to say these are the public documents defining the service. We fulfilled the tarrif in full.
And even at that, that's still speeds only between the customer and the ISP. Once you're outside the ISP it's hard to sue based on internet speeds. At the very least it's not hard ot confuse the issue.
It seems to me that it's going to come down to laws in the state. For instance, if the PUC already voted against taking action on this issue the laws in the state may allow the case to be thrown out.
Even if they lose the only people who will make anything will be the lawyers.
If a friend sends me his birthday pictures in eMail (and he makes LOTS of those), and I get a neat array of 20 mails 2meg each, I EXPECT to be served faster than 128kbps if my pipe allows it. This is one extreme. Another would be that youre subscribed to a few high volume mailinglists (say, securityfocus.*, and a few groups on onelist or egroups) ... Not everybody is, but those who are want their conn to be able to keep up with the steady flow of mails coming in without overloading their POP3-box.
Well the answer to that is that email is really the wrong method for sending 40 megs of pictures. Email is designed to be a carrier of Ascii text messages, and that's what the infrastructure (clients, servers, connections, etc...) are designed to support. That's why most email servers have limits on the maximum size. I don't claim email is low priority, quite the opposite. But it should be low bandwidth, at least for a single user. If you aren't sending big files, then 20 Kbytes is a pretty good sized email. At 128kbps that takes just over one second to transfer. You said you would tolerate more than that in latency.
News is a similar story. It was really designed to transfer ascii text, and therefore to be a low bandwidth service. Now that binary groups are quite common, it has become a high bandwidth service for some. But for the ISP, it's probably a low priority service, because only a small percentage of their customers use newsgroups, or even know what they are.
Now I wasn't claiming that the DSL provider was in the right if they choked those services down. I believe that if you paid for 384k you should damn well get it. I'm just speculating on their reasoning for doing it. Assuming that they really did choke the bandwidth, and it wasn't just server load, then I bet this was the reason they did so.
"Cable customers often boast about getting speeds of up to 300 kB/s, twice the quality of a full t1 line! "
um... Isn't a full T1 1.5 mps or so??
Dirty Pirate Hooker
I just moved out of Texas, and while I was there I used a cable modem. But I had plenty of friends trying to get DSL from Southwestern Bell. They would be promised service on this day or that day. Then delay after delay would ensue.
Not a single one of them ever got it.
Could just be Texas...or Austin for that matter.
-
-
It is possible for your mind to be so open that your brain falls out.
stoopid MB = megabit. also if somebody says they got 3 megabytes/sec, he really means 3 megabits
Bell Atalantic's DSL basically sucks. You can't get it installed now on account of the strike. Either way, they use PPPoE, which make my "always on" connection, not quite alwasy on. Now on to the topic. Bell Atalantic had major difficulties the very week my service was turned on. For teh first day I got 560Kps (I pay for 640), next day and for teh next week it was like 80Kps. I compaliend and I got that week free (like I was able to use it anyway). BA does garuntee a minumum speed.
This is really bad.
I mean, I know the reason they did this has got to be a shortage in bandwidth going into the provider. There's a bandwidth shortage everywhere where the internet exists at this time.
I work for Nortel, and have a few resident experts I talked to about putting in new fiber into the ground. I've also talked to a few Bell Canada contractors who work with this stuff. Everyone agrees that the infrastructure simply isn't there and that it costs way too much to put in more bandwidth, just because the infrastructure has to be upgraded.
And I'm sorry to say it's true. But there is a shartage of bandwidth. THe phone companies can't actually afford all of it, which is besides the fact that we're using it up almost as fast as it's invented!
Conclusion: I wouldn't be surprised if more providers started doing this, simply because of good 'ole dollar sign.
You should all come to calgary (canada) I know of at least 3 ADSL, and 1 cable provider here :)
and I think there may be some more small ADSL types
While I understand how the plaintiffs feel in this case, and intentionally lowering speeds might not be a nice thing for a DSL company to do, I can't see how a suit like this could be taken seriously. Has a law been passed that I'm not familiar with which outlaws such an action?
If a company offers you a service and they say they are going to GUARANTEE 384kbit/s to email, they kindof have to abide by that, it's simple contract law. If at any time that speed goes under 384kbit/s, regardless of cause (act of god notwithstanding), they can be held liable.
If people aren't happy with their DSL service, why can't they just switch providers?
In many cases there is only one high speed provider in the area, a "virtual monopoly" if you will. Sure, you can switch providers... but it'll be dialup.
-- iCEBaLM
I did read the article.  I think that spokesperson is wrong.  Heaven forbid that a sales-driod not know what they're talking about.  So do you have SBC DSL and can show in their terms and condition that you are guaranteed at least 384Kbps to your email?  I don't buy that they guarantee it...
I don't think this is as big of a deal that people are thinking it is. From the article and from what I've heard from other people before is that only traffic dest for the mail/news servers are being throttled back. Traffic dest'n for the anything else still gets the "Best Effort" that one would normally get across the Internet.
Now if they throttled ALL traffic that would be a big issue to get up into arms about. But if they just throttle traffic to their servers instead of adding more servers/server clusters then is it really a big problem if my POP3 or NNTP isn't as blazing quick to their servers than it is elsewhere?
Something to be upset about isn't traffic throttling it's their stupid router that keeps dropping off the face of the earth every so often forcing me to kill dhcpcd and restarting it to get it to respond to my traffic again!!!
-- Ed Bugg --You have freedom of choice, but not of consequences.--
I guess this does vary by region. My roadrunner lets you have three machines (with real IP's). And it's WAY faster than the DSL. For instance, at a place with plenty of bandwidth, like, say, Microsoft, If I get less than 200K for the average of a file transfer, the 'nets having a bad day.
---
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
"Has a law been passed that I'm not familiar with which outlaws such an action? If people aren't happy with their DSL service, why can't they just switch providers?"
I don't know where you live but here in my area we have One (1) telco. They are the only source of DSL and altho they have their own isp as well, the telco provides the hard wiring and the hardware. The local ISP's work with what they get.
Some are better and some are worse but none are worse then the local (Yes, the same company in this article) telco's isp.
And this is a civil lawsuit NOT a criminal case so it has nothing to do with any laws,only with the lack of integrity and honesty of the telco in question.
ah! the internet!! we may still screw up the world but NEVER again will we be able to claim IGNORANCE
No, we have a 3mbit download speed. Hell, with my old Lancity modem, we were theoretically capped at 10mbit! Of course, we never *got* that speed, but I do remember a few 600kB/sec burst tramsissions in the early hours of the morning. Now we're limited to 375kB/sec by the design of the hardware, which is still damn fast. Optimum Online is *great* now.
Just some food for thought. Digest responsibly.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Nothing like downloading at >100K :)
The correct version is C*x@work.
~ppppppppö
Included is maximum possible speed (actual, not theoretical) to/from the CO and actual speed to the CO. Bellsouth's max uplink was around 800Kb/s, but was throttled to 256Kb. That was a definite hard throttle. The maximum possible downstream was very close to 1.5Mb/s, but the actual rate seemed to hover around 1Mb/s, but never went above that. I literally lived across the street from the CO (both as the crow flies and the coppier lies), so I don't see how I could *not* get better connection speeds. Anybody else try this?
hymie
What I want to know is, do any of these people use third party news services like newsfeeds or newscene? If they are still getting throttled then I would be inclined to bitch about it. I always thought it was a basic ISP rule to provide a "bare-minimum" newsfeed, and if you really wanted the gigs and gigs of kitty pr0n you would shell out the cash for a real server.
rosie_bhjp
A radio maverick jumps to internet only. The Future of Rock n Roll
Moderators, this is *not* flamebate. It may look like it, but everything said above is true. Please moderate accordingly.
I get a steady 1.5Mbps out of my DSL. There was an occasion where it was fluctuating between 400Kbps and 750Kbps.
My point is online gaming on Quake/UT/TFC/CS sucks when it fluctuates like that.
-sid
whoa.... this happened to you a few months ago? about 2 months back, my DSL Speed took a the same shit dive yours did, from ~200k/s to sub-80k/s, and they told me there was nothing wrong on thier end, nothing wrong with my setup, must just be the magical pixies, etc etc etc. I'm using SWBell and thier SBC ISP. waiting on the call back from another ISP in town to change my ISP, see if that brings my speed back up. if it does, it'll be real interesting, considering i never got a letter about a cap, or anything, and i'm paying for 1.5Mbit DSL.
Actually, for the last couple weeks or more, people trying to switch ADSL providers have been told by swbell that swbell's "switching software" is experiencing problems and they're unable to switch anybody right now.
Coincidentally, this is about the time that a lot of 1-year ADSL contracts are expiring.
I doubt that your having expensive Sun hardware has anything to do with your speed. A low-end Pentium II would have no problem keeping up with speeds like that.
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
Oh, really? Think about all the people that have televisions. Does the quality of the television decrease when more people are added to the network? I don't think so. Cablemodems essentially use a specialized television "channel" and an sorta-ethernet uplink. Also, it's much easier to alleviate the shared bandwidth problem --- divide the area into smaller segments. Bandwidth is only 'shared' among a single segment, at least in the sense ADSL advocates refer to it as. Not to mention that DSL *is* shared, just at the ISP instead of the local quasi-LAN.
Ahem, I don't consider double T1 speed to be pathetic. 3MegaByte/sec ~ 24Mbit/sec, I also do not consider HALF T3 speed to be pathetic either.
I'm pacbell DSL coustomer since Nov'99. I suddenly started to have outages from third week of July. When I log a trouble ticket the people call me after 10 days. I have 3 domains running for different clients of mine and they are all over me. After some frustrating 3 weeks pacbell came up with an explanation that thier 'records fell out' from 'conversion' from pacbell to SBC!!!!?? I dunno what this crap mean. any ways i have connection once in while and down most of the time. I'm interested if somebody else is also interested to file a class action suite in southern california.
The article makes it sound like the DSL actually works perfectly, but that there's a slow NNTP server, or the server is on a slow link or something. Considering the [lack of] accuracy in the reporter's description of newsgroups, though, I wonder if maybe the problem is poorly described.
Hmm... If you're an ISP that supplies news, and the news is sucking all the bandwidth, and you can afford to piss off your customers, then just use a 286 with a really slow disk for your news server. More request latency -> less traffic. Problem solved. :-)
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
all i can say is wtf?!?!??!?! this guy seems to be smoking something good one second hes talking about @home then hes talking about university lines then hes talking about baked beans? and then he all of a sudden switches to saying @home provides a reasonable upload spead after earlier he had said they cripple upload speed am i missing something?
You wasted your money. Most DSL routers (external anyway,) allow you to set NAT up so you can have almost unlimited internal addresses. the DSL newsgroups have tons of FAQ's on this. Even without an external router, you can setup a gateway on your machine (included in W98 and above, and of course linux...)
fslg503-985-8686503-985-8686503-985-8686503-985-8
The question is, if such a rate can't be guaranteed, why did SBC guarantee it? Or did they? If they said they would provide it but have not, the fact that it is impossible for them to provide such connection speeds doesn't matter.
This case will just resolve whether they baited and switched their subscribers or not. If there was never a possibility that they could provide the promised service, then maybe they should have written a different contract.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
PPPoE is basically a communication encapsulation protocol. Just as a normal dial-up uses PPP, the same goes for PPPoE. Normally a PPP connection enters an authentication stage at the start of a connection. Once authenticated, the data-layer is brought up. (Sorry, brain-fart, can't think of the PPP term) A PPP connection does have the option of reauthenticating a user in the middle of the session, but no terminal servers that I know of do.
Basically, no. PPPoE is not just for authentication. Once the user is authenticated, the Data-Layer will provide the transport of the user traffic, just like a modem uses PPP to transfer data.
The Telco "proper" isn't really in a position to force direct routing. They have to use separate companies to provide the service. (Ameritech.net, etc.) Also, so much of the Telco inertia is in the direction of "switched" services rather than packet services. I've been told by one Telco exec. that they would NEVER put a PACKET router on their network. Basically anything without QoS he didn't think was worth looking at.
The problem with a pure service-provider on the net is the big backbone providers can outfit a data-center with more bandwidth than I could ever afford to buy. They need aggregation points anyway. They offer web hosting at an unbeatable price, and the "local" ISP be killed.
There's also a big issue with access. Long-Haul bandwidth is still expensive. The AT&T's of the world can run their Internet backbone traffic as a UBR service over their internal ATM network. It basically is free for them. They charge a mint if you're not in the same area as a NAP.
I think we're already seeing the Net separating into high-speed and low-speed users. From what I've seen on growth, there are still 3-4 dial-up users coming online for each xDSL user. Many web sites are already assuming that users are on a "higher" speed connection. Yes, Broadband is growing at a significantly faster %increase than dial-up, but I don't expect broadband to exceed dialup usage ANYTIME in the near future. The Internet provides an intrinsic value to a user, just as cable, or phone does. For many slash-dot users, that value is in the range of $30-$120/month. For the majority of Internet users, that value is $20.00. One of two things needs to happen before broadband use exceeds dial-up. Either the cost of broadband has to be equal to dial-up or the intrinsic value of the Internet needs to be raised. A good example of an increase in intrinsic value would be cable-over-xDSL. People already spend ~$35/month on their cable service, and a large percentage of customers in a service area use cable. If you can find a way to bundle cable over DSL, you have raised the value of your service... You can see examples of this with the Cable providers. They are trying to provide cable, phone, and Internet over 1 coax. If you bundle $35 Cable, $25 Phone, and $20 Internet, the value of converged services is $90/month. Provide a discount and you can draw customers.
My thoughts...
At least I'm far away from all those american murder capitals :)
(and I'm a dual citizen (US/Canada) so I can say that if I want...)
Most DSL companies I've looked at will, in fact, offer you higher (and guaranteed) bandwidth, but you have to pay through the nose (because otherwise you end up competing for their T1 services)
--
Ben Kosse
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Ben Kosse
Remember Ed Curry!
Yeah, I know I shouldn't be complaining about this. It's still pretty fast, I'm just bothered that it's happening! It bothers me that they can advertise one thing, and then blatently, without warning implement changes!
Yes, I'm just whining!
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
Right.
So then this easily means if they guarantee bandwidth they are likely misleading the public.
If you get a t1 through a major service provider, you aren't going to get something that runs slower because they have too many t1's hooked up to their backbone.
a T1 should be able to get that level of bandwidth from theri service provider, regardless of load going out to the internet.
Same should apply for residental broadband connections.
no one wants to put up with the jewish bandwidth limitation pulled by SBC, GTE, and others.
pretty much nailed it on the head (of course, no need to use the racist moniker.)
i probably would not have gone with RR if i would have had to sign a year agreement, as SBC in my area (Houston) requires. SBC was offering free installation, but once you sign the agreement, if you move, you have to pay for the new installation.
i agree that DSL maybe superior, but i pull 400kbps all day all night and only pay $40 a month. no service contract, no installation fee!
this might all be immaterial in the years to follow, but for those trying to get DSL, the early adopters are always going to foot the largest portion of the bill. at least with cable, the line is there and is cheap to run - thus building a base has been much easier.
of course you are right too - i'm not a huge fan of Time Warner and feel i am just lucky that i'm happy with RR.
/* Half alive and half dead too, work is for suckers and the sucker is you. - "Half-life" by Local H*/
This isn't at all surprising to me. The name of the game for ISPs is "oversubscription" -- you need to be able to keep much lower bandwidth than the sum of your subscribers. DSL and other high-speed media services make this very difficult, both in terms of upstream internet access and local server capacities.
Given that the ISP in question here is the phone company, I'm not at all suprised at their "We're the phone company and we'll give it to you any way we like it, and not even provide a reacharound" management philosophy. It's even more tempting for them to do this when many of their customers are normal end-lusers who don't have the skills to adequately measure throughput in any meaningful way. To most people, it either works or doesn't work and chopping throughput by 1/3 is transparent to most people.
The outcome to this is important. Even if it they don't win the civil suit, it's really important that these companies get shamed for pulling these kinds of shenanigans and that they put the capital investment in maintaining their infrastructure. Let's be honest -- they're too profit-hungry to keep their servers up to snuff so instead they're shafting the customers. Let's hope the plaintiffs win AND humiliate SBC at the same time.
A T1 line is 1.544 megabits per second (mbps), which translates roughly into about 150 kilobytes per second (kB/s). Anyhow, like I said, I have conversed about cable with many cable customers, and 200-300 kilobytes per second (kB/s) is not unusual for them. 300 kB/s is about 3 megabits per second (mbps), which is roughly twice the 1.544 mbps speed of a T1 line.
The difference between bits and bytes is probably what causes the confusion, which is why ISP's resorted to using megabits and kilobits in their ads instead: the numbers look bigger to customers, who think they're getting a better deal.
Emerson Willowick: Thinker, Writer, Human Being.
Hi, I have been a customer of SWBell for bit under a year now. I signed up for the high priced 5 dedicated IPs and a max of 6Mbit/sec down and 384kbit/s up. Ever since I have bought the service I have only been able to get EXACTLY 1mbit/sec down, and 128Kbit/sec up. I have noticed that these speeds are obviously capped not lag. At the moment they hit 1mb/s down it freezes, it doesnt burst any higher, I can add as many more downloads as I want but I just get slower speeds on all the rest.
When I was having my DSL installed the guy who installed it was very nice. He told me I had the best connection he had ever seen. He showed me that I am a mere 300 feet from my local office. He told me that I should easily be able to get my max speeds. I called SouthWester Bell and they said that they only promise the lowest speed of 1.54Mbit/s. I explained to her that I am not getting that speed and she said that she is sorry that there is nothing that I they could do because I was too far from my office (!!!).
I would have gone with cable but DSL is the only thing available where I live. This really pisses me off and I was wondering what I could do to get my service increased, or my money refunded. If there are any groups that are signing up people for a class action lawsuit or anything would you please post these URLs. I would love to join a lawsuit or something because I have been paying $129US a month for my service, and I am really glad to see that they have been capping the speeds and that this isn't my imagination. Please help me out here.
Thank You for your time
Chris Wallace
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58.0% slashdot corrupt
I'm not sure I see this case as much of a precedent setter. The issue boils down to a rather simple one of contract law - did SBC (ASI) guarantee a link speed that it subsequently did not deliver? if it was a failure, did it occur outside of ASI's reasonable ability to control?
Not dissimilar to the law relating to cartage and freight hauling.
On the other hand, the many responses here point out a more interesting telecommunications issue which very few people are tracking - That "deregulation" of the local loop has, in fact, created 4 or 5 new layers of federal and state beuracracy, in a vain attempt to promote "competition".
The DSL issue in Houston is a perfect case in point. But to understand it, you have to know a little history about it.
In 1996, Congress passed the "Telecom Act", which purported to do, among other things, "de-regulate and open the local loop to competition".
Loosely translated, that means the wise denizens of Congress saw fit to repeal various provisions of the existing regulatory code that governed the RBOC's, and replace it with a new and "better" model. Essentially, they decreed that the RBOC's would henceforth become wholesalers of telecom parts (called UNE's, or un-bundled network elements). The idea being, that "CLEC's" (Competitive Local Exchange Carriers" could buy loops from the RBOC's at a wholesale price, and resell them to customers at a profit. Congress vested the responsibility for implementing this new law with the FCC - an agency of lawyers, led by commissioners who got the job out of political patronage.
At the time, DSL was just a promising new idea, and the broadband boom hadn't started yet. So it was understood, that the loops were going to be sold as voice circuits (POTS), or dedicated DS lines (T1's, T3's, etc.)
Congress was happy (since they could proclaim that they had brought a new age of competition), the RBOC's were happy (they still controlled their nets, and they got to get into long distance too), and the FCC was happy (lots of new regulations for the lawyers to write and argue over) and the CLECS were happy (hey! all I have to do is pass around orders in computers, and I get a nice 17% profit). Life was good.
Of course, it took 3 years for the lawyers at the FCC to write the new rules (they have families to feed too), and in the meantime, along comes this DSL business.
Don't kid yourself, the RBOC's hate DSL. When DSL first appeared, the RBOCs hemmed and hawed and tested the bejesus out of it, and generally kept it on the shelf, until the damned cable companies spoiled the fun, and began to sell cable modem service. Suddenly, dark clouds appeared on the RBOC horizon - the upstart cable companies were offering speeds which began to compare, and even exceed the speeds the RBOC's provided with their T1 business - a very, very lucrative portion of their business to boot. Suddenly, that $1400/mo. T1 line begins to look like a serious ripoff in the face of $40 cable connections.
Imagine, if you will, the collective sound of the rectums of 10,000 telephone company exec's slamming shut, in one gigantic sucking motion.
And, curse the luck, DSL companies like Covad wanted to place DSLAMs at local CO's, so they could begin selling DSL service to customers. Their own equipment!
Try to bear in mind, that several broadband technologies now exist, using the same sort of high-frequency transmission encoding DSL does, that can send and receive data at speeds approaching 60Mbps. Kinda puts a whole new perspective on what DSL could be, doesn't it?
The wiley RBOC's retaliated though, and began to install DSL systems in their headends just as fast as they possibly could. Way faster, in fact, than their CSR and installers could possibly keep up with.
Now why would they do that?
Well, I'll tell you. What you don't know, is that the FCC punted a considerable portion of the regulatory burden onto states - including certifying that the RBOC's had done all the things necessary to "enable competition" so that the RBOC's would be allowed to sell long distance service (read: make mega bucks). So, the smarty men at the baby bells took their fight to preserve T1 service to the local PUC's - in Texas, and in all the other 49 states. They required rulemakings to tell them just exactly what they needed to do to make it possible for them to "help" the CLECs connect their DSL service. And yes, i really mean *exactly*. So the PUC's all over the country are currently embroiled in proceedings to define exactly what the Bells had to do, to allow the Covads of the world to resell their local loops for DSL service. Oh, and did I mention that they installed equipment, lots of it, that ultimately limits the throughput of subscriber premises equipment to 1.5 Mbps or so?
Smarty men indeed. they gained a couple of years, while the lawyers argue, and in the meantime protect their T1 business, while selling DSL service mostly un-molested.
And when the dust clears, they will have a network in place that "won't support" the ultra-high bitrates of the newer HFC technology. Smart, eh?
Of course, the DSL companies cried foul, and immediately sought to force the RBOC's to sell the "platform" (AKA UNE-P) instead of just the conditioned loops. They are currently demanding the right to install their own DLC cards at the big chassis in the local CO's, so they can offer the higher speeds now made possible, and better compete with cable, and Bell itself. Of course, Bell disagrees. Surprise! More fights.
And that's where we are today. Our new 'de-regulated" market, is being done at the Federal, State, and local level, and the lawyers are having a feeding frenzy. In the end, who knows what we will get. Depends on who ends up out-maneuvering whom. Oh, and your DSL service will be a mere shadow of what it could be, until the dust clears.
In the meantime, all the "exactness" the Bells wanted in determining how to allow the CLECs to resell their service has resulted in an amazing blizzard of order forms, line certifications, engineer conditioning checks, etc. etc. ad nauseum being passed between the LECs and the CLECs. That's why it takes 6 months to get your DSL hooked up. heh. -Tap
We had to write on our hands.
You had hands? We had to write on our stubs! And we didn't have pencils, so we had to use sharp rocks. And we had jokes like this that went on so long they weren't funny anymore. And those were the funny jokes!
- Isaac =)
I'm a PacBell DSL customer. PB and SWBC have the same usenet server admin. on pacbell.adsl, or one of the other local gripe groups, the *one* news admin said that he had been asked by his manager to throttle the news servers to 128KB/sec. I think they've lifted that since then, but PC/SWBC news was (and perhaps still is) very spotty. Lots of missing articles compared to ibm.net.
IP addresses are just numbers, but now they're hoarded like the precious commodities they are becoming. Yet another reason for IPv6 and soon...
By the time that the internet pr0n picture got downloaded completely, we had plenty of napkins to.. ..agh.. "enjoy" the picture with.
-vax computer, vi, lynx. 'nuf said
Hum, thats odd because at work we dont use SWbell for our Dsl provider, and I know of at least 10 other dsl providers and there are at least a hundred isp's in the Dallas area that support DSL. The only ything ou have to get from SWbell is the copper pair, and the only reason for this is economics, it is cheaper to lease the pair than it is to run your own. Now there is a monopoly on Cable modem service, but not DSL.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
You said:
. It seems a little nitpicky to me- you'd have to be doing some serious binary newsgroup stuff to have 128kb/s be an issue. Given how much more easily available pron is on the web, I'm not sure there there are many people would notice or care about this
dude, UseNet is THE PLACE for pr0n. sure there is a lot of pr0n on the web but there are too many banner adds, and more often than not they ask you for your credit card number. On usenet there are some serious sickos who upload gigs of video that you'd be hard pressed to find elsewhere. dedicated pr0n surfers will get themselves a decent newsfeed and broadband.
NO CARRIER
I'm not fan of the phone monopolies, but it seems to me that SBC is actually being pretty reasonable. It's a problem every ISP faces: how do you sell somebody network services at a flat rate, and prevent them from reselling those same services, soaking up all your bandwidth in the process? If your NNTP and POP streams are using more than 128 bps, either you're downloading a lot of porn and binaries (in which case you should switch to HTTP or FTP and get a life, not necessarily in that order) or you're reselling NNTP and POP services. If it's the latter, why should you get to do it on SBC's dime?
If they're doing the same for email I'm surprised, but stranger things have happened. I'd expect them to cap message size first, though - how many mail clients out there are set up to automatically split and join multipart messages?
fencepost
just a little off
I have noticed the same symption in Plano, TX. My ADSL download rates and general internet speed has deminished by about 30% in the last two months. Typical downloads run between 12K and 16K except very late at night. I expect it is bandwidth either through my ISP or GTE. The entire internet appears to be slowing down. TOM
Ahem. I have long held the view that the additional competition in DSL provision [vs. static natural monopolies r.e. cable] made it the better choice by far... But after encountering a situation in which my choices were to A: pay 150$ a month for 300Kb/s [Kb, not KB] DSL, or 39 a month for 2Mb/s cable, the choice was hard to avoid.
I have now been using RoadRunner for several months, and honestly, have no real complaints.
I originally thought DSL would be better because the provision for CLOC's in the telecomunications "de"regulation act of 96, while cable would remain a monopoly and thus be less efficient... But I wonder now if perhaps the opening of the door for anyone to colocate at the neighborhood switch to hook up to the termination of your POTS [copper] wires if you agreed to it, has prevented the assorted bells from rolling out the necessary infrastructure as would be needed to get backbone bandwith to the neighborhoods. After all, why invest in tech that is free to be used at near cost by others? Just a thought.
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the pen is mightier then the sword. the sword is mightier then the court. the court is mightier then the pen.
Don't blame SBC for the 128k up problem. Drop your PPoE software and the overhead it incurs, and you'll be running at 128k.
I know, I went to static IPs without PPoE and I run straight even at 384k and 128k.
I was told there's a cap on my line due to the "voice line quality being an 8 and it needs to be a 3." What-the-fuck-ever.
(I'm 8,000 ft from the CO.)
--Talonius
My reality check bounced.
FYI SBC "throttles" everything. They control how much juice to put behind the signal which determines it's speed (depending on how far you are from the router). That is why upload speeds are generally 128kbs because that is all your modem will push. To get 384kbs upload, which is getting more common, they effectively "pull" the signal to get more than 128kbs. That is how their Plant Control Office explained it...i'm no expert.
SBC is forced to open their infrastructure to 3rd parties and are required to offer/sell bandwidth. Most providers can't afford to put in their own router equipment at the "co-location" so they use SBC's router too. Personally I'm switching over to Covad the day my 1 year term ends. Covad has their own equipment and doesn't even run on the same copper pair that SBC uses. So to get Covad you have to have an available copper pair (Read: unused second phone line).
I've been with SBC in Dallas for 11 months now. Service has been great until I needed to call them. They have so many departments and everyone that works there on the phone is brand new. I was explaining how things worked at SBC to THEM since I had called them so many times, getting bumped around to different depts.
It took me 6 weeks to get an upgrade to the service and all that took was some switch flipping on their end. They seem to find an excuse for everything.. scape goat puter system, scape goat "it's not our dept", scape goat "we are busy" blah blah. They've screwed some friends of mine with massive delays and disinformation. I think we will see that this lawsuit will bring many more forward to join in against SBC.
HOW ABOUT A BROADBAND ACCESS BILL OF RIGHTS?!?!?!
"Once in a while you can get shown the light, in the strangest of places if you look at it right." - R.H.
Please refrain from blaming people for linking to my photograph, unless they are actually linking to my photograph.
I'll be your brown eyed girl.
Still rather have a T1... Hmm
Note to self... try to talk boss into T1.....
Dirty Pirate Hooker
I work in the Broadband Operations Department for a very large ISP. this case gains no merit whatsoever. Due to the technical problems from the NID to the CO to the ISP, you simply can't guarantee a rate like that, even if the servers are on your own network. Line and Distance issues interfere too, and as long as the judge has a [good] overview of dsl technology described, the users will be wasting their time. The article did not, however, state whether or not the speed was a provisioning issue, in which case it would be the phone co's fault and have nothing to do with the ISP.
I should be out chasing "burdz"
....
No, don't! They'll just deprive you of your bodily fluids and you'll feel bad afterwards.
But after 10 double-vodka-redBulls I'll have such a bad hangover that it won't matter!
Anyway. As I was saying: 56k modems rock! What is it you earth people are calling ADSL? PLZ write to my phone masters at BT and tell them to give me some!
And another thing! Anyone who needs >128k reading gnus needs to be very carefull of the newsgroups they are reading
As a smart consumer I'm getting more and more aggitated that people who make enough goddamn money off you keep penny pinching you to the point of insanity.
I hate politics, I hate the greedy, and I hate the stupid... why must the world be populated by so many.
--Malachi
"Life is all about strategy, mathematics and psychological perceptiveness."
Sorry, i should have said that Cox@Work will be capped at 10Mbit and that the "modem" has a 100BT port.
Mark Duell
Yes, T1's are still more desirable than cable to many because the bandwidth providers offer better service and support(because of the cost), because the upload is fully symmetric (cable usually gets anywhere from 30-100 kB/s for upstream), and because T1's are isolated, avoiding the whole shared bandwidth complaint. Still, it is quite ridiculous that cable customers can get these kind of speeds while DSL users get the shaft from their providers.
Emerson Willowick: Thinker, Writer, Human Being.
Yes, DSL is more technologically advanced than cable internet, but only bgecause it has to be--it takes a lot of finessing to get high bandwidth connections over tiny little copper telephone lines. I'm waiting for RR cable service to get to my area instead of dealing with DSL precisely because I'm sure that the old copper wires in my house and stretched across the telepjone poles in my very old neighborhood won't handle DSL, and if they do it'll be at a horribly slow connection rate.
Cable, however, has very fat pipes with almost unlimited capability for growth and carrying more bandwidth--any wires that can deliver 120 channels of full NTSC cryastal clear to my house can handle major internet bandwidth. Granted, a cable connection often offers instabilities in its bandwidth, but fluctuating between 0.75Mbps and 1.5Mbps beats the hell out of getting a steady 0.375 or 0.5Mbps. Plus, there's room for expansion in the future with cable--there's a lot of future-proofness in those fat pipes, whereas copper phone lines have to be reaching their limits sooner. It's just simple math.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
Sure, but both times when the user base in my area's made my Road Runner hookup slow, they've upgraded the connection. I get faster downloads now than I did 18 months ago when I was almost the first person in the area with RR.
FYI... I've heard from someone at SBC is that they use a rule of thumb of 4-5 DSL users for each DS1 from the Central Office which basically means they are allocating about 386k per DSL users.
-- Ed Bugg --You have freedom of choice, but not of consequences.--
I've had residential SBC DSL (guaranteed 384k down/128k up) through SNET here in Connecticut since April. When initially installed, within a few weeks of the service first being offered, we were getting around 800k down. Since then, it's dropped down to right around 380k. So, I can't complain, but it does seem like they are running very close to the edge on the bandwidth in my area (New Haven).
that was damn insightful
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
DHCP is much better.
sulli
sulli
RTFJ.
DSL = Damn Slow Line.
Does that make ADSL = Awfully Damn Slow Line?
-j
I've worked (and keep working :) in telecoms all my life and after reading most of the comments I have some comments.
Are you sure that they are capping bandwidth or are they congested? In the telco industry to oversubscribe (I've seen rates from 1/2 to 1/512) a service is a common practice (You usually take into account the bandwidth you have and assign a worst case scenario in which a percentage of all subscribers transmit and receive simultaneously). The bad part is that most network engineers don't take several factors into account like exactly what applications are being used. It's a lot different to oversubscribe if the final app is web browsing (Where you know that most users go to only five or six pages and you have proxies around) or Napster/FTP (Where you're going to have your bandwidth maxed for periods of time).
Another issue, how good is their connection to the Internet backbone? How many NAP points do they have? Usually having one huge pipe to one provider (as in bbn, uunet or digex) is not enough, you need two or three in order to have some traffic balancing. Also most IEX points are congested and unfortunately most of the content seems to be placed in 2-3 major providers.
So IMNHO I think this is a sign of poor network design as much as malice from their marketing dept.
ZoeSch
I hate to agree with davecrazy but...
IMHO - if you can get it, go RoadRunner - i have yet to have problems and it has been three months on CounterStrike bliss!
I live in the Albany area, and have used Road Runner for a while now. I live in a house with three roommates, two of whom are hardcore geeks. We have recently subscribed to DSL, from a local provider, Speakeasy, and are comparing the services before deciding to unsubscribe from either service.
Road Runner has been decent, in the sense that it has been alternately horrible and wondeful. When it's working, it runs 200kBps-300kBps. (note, that's bytes, not bits. Meaning 5 seconds per MB, tops) This beats the pants off the DSL, which for a comparable price gives us exactly 60kBps all the time. However, RoadRunner has gone down rather frequently (I can't say for sure it was network outages vs. line problems, but it fixed itself after a couple hours, and regardless of the cause it was still a problem) and has recently been very unreliable, as far as speed is concerned. For the past week or two I've been getting mostly around the 5-25 kBps range.
I'm not going to say one is better or worse, but they serve different needs. The DSL has provided us with a much more reliable connection, and allowed us 4 static IP Addresses, as well as giving us access to functons like reverse DNS. This is much better for the hardcore geeks and businesses who want to run their own email, web, ftp, etc... servers. RoadRunner, on the other hand, is much faster. It is a beautiful solution to the home recreational surfer who wants to fetch web pages and files at high speeds, but who doesn't need reliability or advanced functions, like static IPs.
I get a steady 1.5 Mbps down, and a not as steady 128kbps up. I'm less than 5k feet from my CO. I think there's one reason why they haven't capped me down yet. I'm probably the only person being serveced by that CO. I live in Mira Loma, CA (the hick suburb of Riverside, CA), so I think I'm safe. But it does piss me off when at least 20% of the time the damn mail servers go down.
just my $0.02
"one treats others with courtesy not because they are gentlemen or gentlewomen, but because you are" --G. Henrichs
I was in a meeting about 6 months ago where people were joking about how long it would take for the first class action law suit over deceptive DSL advertising to show up... The throttling is done by the network design. The DSLAMs concentrate the traffic from 576 customers onto a T3 (45 mbps) line. Do the math... That comes out to about 78 kbps/customer. Far below the guaranteed rates. BTW, I have RoadRunner and will change to DSL ASAP. Despite the deceptive ads DSL is still better than a cable modem. And, I can have as many machines as I want on a DSL and I can have a server on a DSL. Things that I can't have on RoadRunner. Not to mention that RoadRunner is about to become AOL.
Yeah, we laughed at your town having a guy walking around delivering bits. We had the Pony Express!
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
My newsserver limits/throttles connection speeds... however, you can have multiple connections open, so I open 3-5 parallel downloads when i'm doing things like downloading binaries.
My other first post is car post.
I have my DSL (silver) loop through Verizon, but I'm using a large Texas based ISP (also one of the largest commercial usenet providers) through it. With DSL, it is possible in many areas to get a loop through a ILEC (Ma Bell) and get a different ISP. As long as the ISP has the FR or ATM link to the ILEC that is possible. Most ISPs these days market their DSL with CLEC loops such as Covad or Northpoint, even though many are able to provide service with ILEC loops also.
SBC, the San Antonio based company is currently phasing out their DHCP service in favor of PPPoE. I have heard that it has affected some current SWBell customers already (SWBell mailing out current customers with new PPPoE modems). I do not know if this affects PacBell. Because of this phase out, many ISPs are no longer able to sign up new customers to use a SWBell loop. IIRC, many ISPs provide service via NAT, static, or DHCP IP assignments. SWBell has changed their COs VPI's to a way that it will only work with PPPoE, it does not affect current SWBell loop customers running through another ISP though. Now why will it not affect current customers but not allow new customers to be signed up I don't know. SWBell.net are signing up new customers to use the damned PPPoE and are no longer doing DHCP. Other ISPs which do offer service in PPPoE (I don't know if FreeDSL counts, but thats one of them) are able to use SWBell's loop though. The bottom line is that but doing this, SWBell effectively forces people who are unable to get a CLEC service, to get SWBell's loop AND their ISP (there aren't many PPPoE capable ISPs).
This practice has made a lot of people (ie: friends I know) quite upset because they can only get PPPoE and mate it with a PPPoE ISP. I don't know if the lawsuit covers this side of the issue, but it would be nice if it does. As to the ranting about the speeds, IMO, they are whining too much. IIRC SWBell does not have minimum loop guarantees, don't know about ISP though. At least with Verizon, with Silver and up, you get minimum gurantees. Most of the people I know who have SWBell loops are very happy with their speeds, they get 1.2+Mbps most of the time. The slow speeds maybe caused by a overloaded usenet server, but I don't know. The only capping I know is the upstream, 128k for the 1.5/128 and 384k for the 6M/384 service respectively. Also another thing about SBC is the nature of their ATM network; in a congested CO, a lot of packets from the ISP will be marked DE (discard enable) and get dropped in favor for someone who is paying more for their loop who get packet priority. This will result in very poor speeds due to packet retransmission until the loop is capped to a slower speed. With Verizon's FR network, they have BECNs which will be sent to the ISP telling them to throttle back and to prevent as much packet loss as possible. The nature of cable and telcos these days is to oversubscribe their service. You are paying around 40 dollars of service, and thats what you get. The "slow" speeds you get are usually still better than a dialup. The reason for this oversubcription is mostly because telcos have to cover the costs for running the network and that they want people to get a T1 from them, thats where they make the big bucks.
|TheMAN
This is a civil case, not a criminal one. There is no "innocent until proven guilty."
Basically, the jury/judge has to decide who is _more_ right, not decide whether the plaintiffs have proven that some wrongdoing occurred.
it must open up those lines (by law) to competitors, at some reasonable prices (I don't know how they determine this!).
:)
Though they don't neccesarily do so. For instance, here in Baltimore, there are a good half dozen DSL providers, but you can only have voice + data on the same line if you go through Bell Atlantic - and BA will try to screw you for all you're worth if you want to get a second line installed - one guy I know got an estimate of $1000 for getting a new line installed so he could get DSL. And if you go with BA, you have to deal with the outages, bad service, slow speeds, and atrocious network administration associated with them.
So I guess I'll be getting a cell phone or something.
Now, I don't have PacBell DSL, so I'm not certain of their terms and conditions, but I can pretty much guarantee that the CIR (committed information rate) of 384kbps is to the DSLAM.  At least that's how it is with my DSL provider.  On top of it, I don't really feel too sorry for these people as my DSL does not allow any bursting and I currently have no other broadband choices to my home...
>They are probably paying more than us modem users.
You know, I thought about that once, and realized it is CHEAPER for a heavy internet user to get high speed internet. Look at your costs (remember, heavy internet user): [BTW: This is in Canada, so $CAN]
-- $23/mo. second phone line.
-- $20 - $25/mo. service (decent service will cost).
My local DSL provider (well, local to the city, but won't give any DSL to me, crappy exchange, out in the country, lucky I didn't get stuck with a party line [still legal in Ontario, Canada]) charges $30 a month (goes up to $40 after 3 months).
Any way you look at it, DSL is cheaper than a phone line (here, in Canada). Since high-speed lines have ALWAYS been cheaper in the US, I assume your DSL is too (might be wrong though...).
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
It sounds to me like what happened was that Bell decided that email and newsgroups were low-bandwidth services, and that nobody would complain if they got choked a little, so they throttled the speed down. This seems a good idea for home users, (who REALLY needs to fetch their email faster than 128kbps?) but when you have a full-fledged business, you need the bandwidth. So they got caught. Sort of.
I suspect however, that the Houston co won't be able to prove anything, because there are 500 factors that COULD be responsible for the slow speed, and their case will fail.
When I was looking at a new ISP, SWB (SBC) offered 384kbps/128 for $50/mo w/ 1yr contract and a 2-3 week waiting list... RoadRunner was $40/mo no contract, 3 day waiting list, and it turned out to be about 3mbps/430kbps, and newsgroups and email are never capped... guess who I went with? My friend on the other hand, right before cable was deployed signed up for a year w/ SWB, and he was stuck. SBC is evil!!!!!!!!!!!!!
just got off the phone with RR. they will be out in less than two weeks. We do have satalite for television, so they need to charge us $50 a month for the service, but when I divide that out, it ends up prety much even with DSL and the initial instalation charges. As far as the other DSL providers, I could have gone that rout, but all the other providers in the area have to go through SBC for the line, and if any problems arise, I have to call "provider A", they call SBC. SBC "fixes" the problem, never calls "provider A" back. Later I call "provider A", they call SBC to find out what happened, then maybe they call me back blablablalba..........you get the idea.
Dirty Pirate Hooker
Hi,
I've no comment on Houston's problems, but my big bugbear at the moment is PacBell's Bay Area DSL operation (also run by SBC).
Always up is a complete joke. Maybe once a week I cannot connect at all and maybe twice a week their DNS servers are down. Luckily I know several friendly and fast DNS servers. If I was a novice users I'd be locked out half the time.
PPPoE is also a piece of sh*t....(apologies if it isnt the protocols fault...)
Support contact is very difficult to obtain as well.
If they start cutting the speeds up here that would be the end of my relationship with them.
Winton
Many people enjoy trouble free Road Runner from the get go. Everyone who has not had problems with either the installation or network troubles loves it to death.
/me claims to not work for TW/RR...
Then there are those who love it when it works, but frequently experience outages that are not newtork troubles, but coaxial issues and signal level problems and the like. They usually bear it because they know once it comes back life will be good again.
Then there are those who have nothing but problems. Maybe they're at the very end of a cable run and need an amp/repeater or something, but no matter how many times service techs go out they just can't get it right. These are the ones who try to make Road Runner look really bad when they're (RR) doing what they can to resolve it.
Then there are those who believe that always-on means light-speed-instantaneous and just don't (want to) understand how it really works. The advertisements they use on the radio really don't help, and give the impression that EVERY connection and EVERY transfer is going to take place in a matter of seconds.
If you get it and it works, enjoy! If you have tremendous problems, don't automatically assume that TW/RR is being deceptive and neglecting you and lowering service quality and stealing your money and laughing at you all the while and purposely making your life hell because you want to run a business and you don't understand what 'entertainment purposes only' means and your service went out 4 times today at a whopping eight minutes a pop and that's just unacceptable in your opinion and you want it fixed now and not in three days like the tech support guy said and you're going to blow the whistle and post to newsgroups and tell ABC and NBC and CBS and BBB FBI and CIA and XYZ and whoever else you want to tell.
Long signatures suck.
Not if the tradeoff is having to live in that god-forsaken wasteland! ;-)
In one incident, the line went totally fubar, so they disconnected and reinstalled it (part of procedure, they said). It took over four months to get DSL back, all the while they tried to charge me.
That is just one (probably the worst, actually) of several incidents, but honestly I don't think I'd sue over it. If you push the issue, they will simply disconnect your DSL and stop billing you. I do take some small solace in the fact that, from the estimates of the hours of time I've wasted on the phone with technicians and managers, I've blown over US$2000 of theirs.
funny munging
Well I live in the Good Ol US of A and I connect every day at 26400 with my 56k modem... I would give my left arm to connect at 49333....
I've had the advertised "384kbps-1.5Mbps downstream / 128kbps upstream" DSL from PacBell for about a year now. I used to have it with the PacBell ISP, and I've often got download speeds of ~250k/sec. In other words, even beyond 1.5Mbps. Well, a few months ago I've gotten a letter in the mail from PacBell that they no longer have a choice of ISPs, and the ONLY ISP available is through SBC, to which I was automatically changed. With this new change, my downstream is FIXED at 80k/sec, I guess 640kbps or whatever. Now, I wonder if this is illegal, because it is obviously CAPPED at 640kbps. And I am paying for "384kbps-1.5MBps depending on how good your line is" deal, so if it's capped, at least they should cap it at 1.5MBps. Long story short, SBC sucks.
I can't comment on current throughput, but approx. 1 year ago I had DSL service in Houston from SBC. Before I had my DSL disconnected (long story) I measured downloads from newsgroups at right around 900kb/sec. If they had throttled that down to 128k while I was still subscribed you can bet your @$$ I'd be suing them too.
---
No kidding... I was able to pull over 500KB/sec downstream over RoadRunner in upstate New York, and about 50-60KB upstream. I was never bothered about the web server I had running, though a few of their techs knew it existed, and the only port they blocked was sendmail (and I believe that's a good thing, with all the spammers out there...) I'd go back to RR in a second if it was of the same quality out here.
:-)
PacBell DSL has really disappointed me, I top out around 150KB downstream and 13.5KB upstream. I'm pretty close to the telecom too. The bandwidth and service limitations that @home imposes in the Silicon Valley area make cable a non-starter, even worse than DSL. I suppose everything, even bandwidth, is more expensive out here though
GPL: Free as in will
This is funny. :) Offtopic but at least it is original....all Slashdot readers should see it, not just the ones that browse at 0 or -1...
I used to DREAM of conecting at 26400. When I was a boy I we could only connect at 1 bit/hour.. we had to scribble the bit on a napkin and trek through the freezing rain uphill to our ISP and then uphill back home. Our ping was horrible.
For every succesfull DSL install I have heard about or read about, there are 5 others out there that are real horror shows.
Take my install with Fastpoint (ISP), COVAD (DSL) and Verizon (Telco). It is rapidly approaching 6 months since I originally ordered my ADSL and I have yet to get a synch up. Its not that I live in an area where DSL is impossible (at least 2 others in my neighborhood have it through COVAD). Its not the fact that Verizon is now on strike (you'd have to chop 5 months off the current install time for that to be the problem.) It definately seems to be the fact however, that a) my ISP doesn't push hard enough with installs, b) COVAD has no power over the lines they install DSL on, and c) Verizon has absolutely -zero- clue and -zero- interest in making a loop DSL ready.
So, I certainly doubt this will be the last of the law suites we see against DSL providers. They are all making claims they can't live up to and preaching their own special versions of the truths of DSL installation (average 21 day install time my ass.)
Anyone that is thinking about getting DSL certainly owes it to themselves to check out http://www.dslreports.com. I certainly wish I had before I signed up for the install hell I've been put through. I've already completed round 1 of my complaints to both the FCC and BBB. It felt good to do it, even though I doubt it will have any real impact.
http://windows.scares.us
I regularly get 150-200k/second download speeds on my Road Runner connection. I signed up for ADSL to try it out, and not only did it take 6 hours on 2 different days to get set up, it had major reliability problems after that. And the provider only gives out internal PCI cards from Efficient Networks which only work with Windows 9x - no NT/2000, no MacOS, and definitely no Linux/BSD. Most cable modem services use an external modem with a standard 10Base-T connector.
:)
I think you know which of the 2 connections is getting cancelled and which one I'm keeping
Houston has just been totally screwed over. I live in Humble, just outside of Houston and near Houston Intercontinental Airport, and the ONLY local telco provider is Sprint Local Services. Nobody is planning to offer DSL in this area... We can't even get Cable because we were owned by TCI before Warner and the lines are SO terrible... I literally live 10 minutes away from all sorts of high speed access, but for the next 2 or three years at least, I won't be able to get ANY of it...
actually, on the contrary, when i have used the CS (twice) i have received pretty good service and generally prompt answers.
yeah, we've had 2 outtages in the couple of months that i have been using RR, but at least one also knocked out the TV signal - can't really blame them there.
and yeah, sometimes it is slow, but hey for those 3 or 4 min i got get a drink or use the bathroom. having that pipe into my house and getting away from dial-up has been very liberating and has allowed me to love surfing from home almost as much as at work (with the massive T3!)
/* Half alive and half dead too, work is for suckers and the sucker is you. - "Half-life" by Local H*/
I helped set up multiple locations for friends when I was at school in upstate NY as well. RR there has dropped that asinine login system, and furthermore, provide up to 3 free IP addresses per modem. All you need to do to activate them is to call, and tell them that you have multiple machines. the buggers are active within a minute, and it was great.
However, the story changes dramatically in Saint Louis area. DSL Reports has information on DSL in the area, and reports that DSL may be available in my area. The reality, however, is that coverage is spotty at best, and DSL is not truly available in my area. Instead, companies such as Primary Networks and other CLECs rely upon SBC to determine whether they should even send a technician out to the customer sites. It seems that these companies are spending more money on advertising DSL than implementing DSL. The site is full of horror stories regarding the slow speed in which the installation takes place, and spotty at best service record of the various ISP's and SBC.
My coworker, who lives in Maryland Heights, MO, states that CableAmerica's cable modem service installed quickly, and he is now enjoying 500kbps downstream/128kbps upstream bandwith. This service was installed within a few days of ordering, and it went without a hitch.
Of course, AT&T Cable does not offer a Cable Modem service where I live, so I'm pretty much SOL for broadband. Get me back to NY. PLEASE.
--
AOL(Road Runner) was down there screwing with SBC before. This sounds like more of Case/McNeely/Ellison tactics. You know, you can't compete honestly by the quality and features of your product. Instead you steal competitors trash, hire private detectives, and try to talk some goverment lawyers to go after them for you in the name of competition (Thank Gore's infinite gullability for these wild patents and anti-trust activity in all arenas)!
I've managed to pull 3MB/sec down quite easily so far, but the upload speed is limited to 1MB/sec. We'll see...
With the recent forced upgrade to the customer cable modems they've also closed the door on having multiple machines get IPs with DHCP. Now it's only one IP per modem - so they can charge you another $19.95 per month, PLUS another modem for each additional machine. I used a Netgear RT311 gateway router to get around that little SNAFU. For $100 it was a great investment.
funny munging
The Baby Bells had to allow for choice in ISP, and they did not want to be liable for any content they provide.
SBC is just the pipe, and as long as you can get 384K data through that pipe 24x7, they are doing what they said they would. That the ISP is limiting the feed rate is a business decision the SBC can not be held accountable for.
SBC will draw a network diagram, showing the demarcation points in their network, how the Usenet/email feeds are outside the demarcation points, and thus outside the scope of the agreement. This will be dismissed.
As it should be, IMHO.
Ken
You sound technically astute enough to know this, but I'll state it for anyone else who might be reading. Even if the Terms of Service for RoadRunner say you can't run multiple computers, there's really no way they can stop you. Install a LinkSys router (there's a review here) between your computers and cable modem, and it will act as a proxy. RR will perceive the router as a single machine. Short of coming out and inspecting, RR isn't going to be able to tell how many real computers are on it. And if they give you any static, tell them it's a hardware firewall to protect you from the hordes of crackers who are trying to penetrate your system (a true claim by the way; the router can be configured to refuse all incoming connection attempts, which is a good idea). I have Cox @Home and this is exactly what I've done.
"If I have seen further than other men, it is by stepping on their glasses." - Michael Swaine
Attempt to dodge off-topicness: 128k is pathetic for DSL, isn't it?
128kb is pathetic no matter how you go about getting it.
Southwestern Bell, Pacific Bell, Ameritech, SNET, Prodigy, and about 50 other companies. Rodney L. Caston Tools Engineer SBC Internet Services
Lets say I had a dialup 28.8 Kbps connection and decided to run an FTP server. Someone using SBC's dsl access would try to download from me, and only get about 2.5 KBps.
According to these customers, it would be SBC's own fault. What the hell is this world coming to? Just another example of why newbies should not be allowed on the Internet.
Oversubscription is a way of life. Cable has been reputed to not increase net pipes very often, and now it looks like DSL is going the same way. When will the "powers that be" understand that reducing bandwidth (real, perceived, or effective) will just make people dissatisfied? Is deregulation the answer? Can most people with DSL choose their provider? Not in this area... With multiple providers, one could just ditch the one with this kind of policy for another...
Don't pick up the pho*(@)$*@&@!@ NO CARRIER
I wonder if all of us @home users could sue @home since they severely crippled our uploading speed..
just signed up with RR
Dirty Pirate Hooker
funny munging
Heh.
I've had DSL for roughly four months now, extended service I'm supposed to be paying $90 USD for.
Haven't been billed yet because some schmuck in their install department forgot to mark my order complete. (I kid you not. Everytime I call to get it reconnected I get "You're using DSL? With static IPs? We don't show that, we show you as being not installed yet!" Then I go through the procedure of explaining Yes! I have DSL! and they fix it but never fix the "not installed yet" indicator.)
Gotta love beauracracies in some cases.
-- Talonius
My reality check bounced.
Normally, I would say shut up and get another ISP. But that's not really possible, because phone companies and cable providers have monopolies on broadband home access. And because of this, I think such a lawsuit is greatly justified.
Although I would question how they know that their access is being slowed by the ISP. It would seem to me that it'd be very difficult to prove such a thing.
Because things like DSL and Cable are in the infancy, this case will determine how much control an ISP actually has. This will also further determine ISP's relation as telecommunications providers.
funny munging
Boy I wish people would read the article before posting...
Now, I don't have PacBell DSL, so I'm not certain of their terms and conditions, but I can pretty much guarantee that the CIR (committed information rate) of 384kbps is to the DSLAM.
The article states:
SBC guarantees a minimum access rate of 384 kilobits per second for its DSL service but not for newsgroups, which are provided by SBC's Internet subsidiaries, which include Southwestern Bell, said SBC spokesman Michael Coe. Newsgroups are Internet sites where individuals can exchange and download material such as large graphic files.
However, e-mail access is guaranteed at a minimum of 384 kilobits per second, he said.
-- iCEBaLM
The difference between bits and bytes is probably what causes the confusion, which is why ISP's resorted to using megabits and kilobits in their ads instead: the numbers look bigger to customers, who think they're getting a better deal.
True, but personally, even if I could get a cable modem (the lines are too old in Baltimore for it to work), I wouldn't. First, @Home (which is selling cable modems in the surrounding counties), is supposed to be a particularly crappy ISP, especially for people who want to run servers (aka, me). Also, DSL offers nicities like multiple IPs (8 for $25 / month, in my case), reverse DNS, etc.
For the average Win9x home user, cable modem may well be the best choice. But for the geek, DSL kicks ass, even if it is slower.
Being a control-freak power-user myself, I'd be upset especially since many of these regions don't have any alternative to DSL. People in my neck of the woods could get cable, but this is another example of corporate strong-arming for the bottom line earnings-per-share and shareholder equity rather than customer service and quality. It's a shame.
Even though the phone company is required to open up their DSL lines to competitors, it doesn't mean that they won't find a way to enforce thier monopoly. I used to work for a company in Southern California that got their DSL lines through Pac Bell, and their service through Flashcom (I think?). Whenever the Pac Bell office had DSL problems of their own, they would "debug" their system by unplugging all of the non-PacBell customers DSL phone lines, effectivly ending our service. Sometimes, it would take 3-4 days to get the lines plugged back in & working again, so unless these incedents were isolated to our area (which I doubt), I can't imagine that the other providers would have a fair shot at providing good service.
Doh!
I have a friend that works for PacBell installing DSL lines for residential customers in the San Joaquin Valley.
He's been ordered by the company to cap people well under what they're paying for. Apperently if a user suspects this based on their upload/download speed Tech Support is to tell the customer that it's most likely because of the line quality inside the houes which PacBell is not responsible for.
Apperently the only way you can accurately mesaure the speed is with a special tool the DSL installers have.
Unfortunately my friend would not speak up since the job pays quite a lot and he's new, so he didn't want to mess with a good thing.
My advice would be for users to actually see the measured speed the tool is reporting before signing off that the work was completed. Either way I think the lawsuit will flesh it all out.
-- This space intentionally left blank.
What you didn't catch (and obviously the moderators didn't also) is that this is a comment posted by somebody else (GlassUser) and this AC copied it. Signature and all. He then copied other comments, pasted them together and presto: Instant "Score 1: Interesting"
Kilroy was here!
Most likely the email rate the complainant measured was the result of server load - rather than a bandwidth limitation. (It also makes a difference what time of day speeds are measured; the heavier the traffic the slower the shared connection runs.
Not in this case. I have SBC DSL service in St. Louis. A few months ago they put a notice on there web site saying that they will intentionally be limiting the download from their newsgroup servers. The bandwidth for all other DSL service is not limited. I don't use there newsgroup servers, so this really doesn't bother me. As long as they don't limit my normal banwidth, I don't care.
True, but the playing field will quickly be leveled when the user base on any segment reaches critical mass and everyone slows down to 56K speeds.. then the bitching will start.. Add to that the inherent security issues that broadband (DSL inclluded) bring up, and it won't be long before the feds step in to regulate these services.
Dirty Pirate Hooker
Info on the DSL service
DSLreport.com has some good customer reviews of SBC DSL, people should read that too.
Unfortunately, I can't find anything on the SBC site about a cap. I'm going to try scanning DejaNews
funny munging
With cable modems this is true, but with DSL, this is typically not true. The limiting factor with DSL is whether or not a CO contains the switching equipment to support the service. IANAL, but as I understand it if the primary carrier offers xDSL in the area, it must open up those lines (by law) to competitors, at some reasonable prices (I don't know how they determine this!).
So if the primary carrier offers xDSL, it's almost always quickly followed by some CLEC offering the same service. Because of this DSL has some pretty serious consumer benefits with it, in that if I don't like my DSL ISP, there's almost always another ISP in the area that will happily switch over your service to them.
I suspect this is why DSL carriers enforce long term contracts, so that they can be immune from competition for a little bit!
Personally, I'd like to see the cable companies have to be subject to the same open access requirements that the phone companies are required to follow.
$.02
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
It's what you do with it.
Really, though. This article doesn't explore in-depth the 'tests' he ran to determine he was being cheated for bandwidth.
Since SBC uses an ATM fabric all the way out to their DSL modems, it is possible to assign priority to different types of traffic. SO, it
is not a question of COULD SBC be doing this, but ARE they doing it?
The question to me is a matter of physical bandwidth vs. logical bandwidth. After all, the customer can still pass 384K of traffic, but there's nothing in the guarantee that says SBC's news servers must be able to support twenty-thousand users hitting them at 384K at the same time.
Good customer service would dictate that they attempt to keep up and provide servers which can handle the traffic. However, I think it would be terribly hard to PROVE that news bandwidth was being intentionally limited at the customer end. I'm not saying it COULDN'T be limited there, just that it could be limited elsewhere without technically violating the agreement. I would really appreciate more detailed information about the supposed 'tests' that have determined this.
These people looked deep into my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined.
Does anyone out there believe that any of the Bell companies will give the service they prove? Does anyone need proof anymore to prove what these people are up to?
In Portland, OR there is a system where if a police officer suspects someone is selling drugs, he can ban him from the area where he is suspected of selling drugs with absolutly no proof . Now, some people might think this is a bad idea, but what I really think is that it needs to be expanded.
Everyone knows that the telephone companies cheat their customers every chance they get. It's accepted and agreed upon that this is the normal state of affairs. So why even go through the legal formalities of it. What we need is a law that anytime a Bell Company is accused of cheating their customers, the lawsuit is automatically found in favor of the plaintiffs, without legal formalities.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
Depends where you are using RoadRunner.
Northeast Ohio (NEO) Roadrunner is notorious for inconsistent performance, overselling bandwidth, and poor support.
The USENET server is usually either slower than a one-legged man in a marathon, or up and down more than a Catholic at Mass. Recently they changed the local roadrunner.* news hierarchy to roadrunner.neo.*, and didn't bother to tell their customers until a week later. These things usually prompt serious USENET users to subscribe to a third-party service, which adds $10-$15 a month to the old internet(re: crack) habit.
The mail-server goes through spells of can't send, can't receive, or speed that makes you feel that you could fetch the mail faster if you ran to the server and personally carried each byte home separately.
They have a network status page that they never use. I guess whoever created it didn't want to mess up their pretty new web page with things like system and service outages.
The no-help desk is broken into 3 groups. You must pass through each group sequentially.
Local: Can ask 3 questions:
1. Is your cable light on the modem on?
2. Is your pc light on the modem on?
3. Would you like hot, tasty beverage?
(Actually I can't remember #3. But it's just as inane)
National:
Doesn't have access to our local network, so they can't verify any problems. They know a lot more questions, but only have 1 answer: Let's remove your TCP/IP stack and re-install it.
Local w/Intelligence Upgrade:
This group actually knows WTF is going on. The problem is, it took 3 to 5 days to get to this group.
Don't ask how much packet loss we've been enduring lately. I'm to the point now that I've given up on-line gaming.
All these things from a service that has been running for 4 years. That's right, to my knowledge, NEO RoadRunner was the first commercial rollout of cable-modem broadband internet access in the USA. I believe the beta-test was in Ithaca, NY.
Time-Warner Cable at it's best.
I'm not a subscriber, but part of thier advertsing blitz was the mention of a one year contract. SWB aledgedly broke their contract, but probably doesn't want any of thier customers to do the same.
--
Does narcissism count as a hobby? --Shawn Latimer
If you want 1.5megs per second, get a T1.
Our company bought a couple of Frame Relay T1's that where cheaper than Point to Point T1's. The reason they where cheaper is that we weren't Garunteed 1.5Mb, because it whent through a shared pool of other connections. We then wanted garunteed bandwidth, and ordered 2 Point to Point T1's instead.
This is the same concept as consumer broadband. It is completley ludicrous to think that every home user should have a dedicated 1.5Megabit connection to their home. What's cool about consumer broadband, is because of their overselling of bandwidth, we can all "share" a larger pool of bandwidth for a very reasonable price. There are some ISPs who may unfairly oversell the bandwidth, true, but I've known many to have very good speed for their connections especially when considering the relatively VERY low monthly fees for the service.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
Here in Silicon Valley, I've had my DSL for about 1.5yrs. When I first signed up, everything was through PacBell, both the line and the ISP. Then a couple months ago I got a letter saying that my DSL service had been taken over by SBC communications. Three weeks after that letter I got another one saying that access to mail servers and newsgroups would be limited to 128k. So it's not really a matter of congestion [other than that's why they are limiting it]. They are really throttling it.
So does the suit have merit? Unclear. Unless SBC advertised a guaranteed service speed for the mail and news services, I would doubt it
I'd have to say no, the suit doesn't have merit. The DSL company guarantees X-bandwidth between your house and their 'house'. They don't [and CANNOT] guarantee connection speeds to specific internet servers.They never guaranteed speed to their mail or news servers, only the speed of the line to the CO.
On that note, I'm a bit pissed at SBC already. For the 1+ years I had the DSL handled by PacBell, I got 1+Mb down/128 up. [I pay for only 384 down/128 up]... As soon as they switched to SBC, my downlink dropped to 800Kb... yeah I know thats still alot, and more than I'm guaranteed but after a year of near T1 speeds it still sucks.
They also have screwed up my billing. They credited me for 1 month of service then billed me for 4 months of service that I had already paid for. My last bill was $250, without long distance [DSL charges just come in on my phone bill]. I'm still trying to get that one taken care of.
Ender
Nothing to see here
I've got the same deal with PacBell (384k-1.5M/128k). I got the same letter regarding the change in ISP, but I think it was a regulatory-induced change in accounting not anything meaningful. I have consistently gotten a good download speed from them, limited only by the sites I visit. For example, I just downloaded my Norton Anti-virus updates at the usual 128kBps (1024kbps). And only one five minute outage in 10 months.
I like my DSL. But don't get me started on PacBell's email servers!
Yeah, and he's right. And I might add that the kiddies who set out to savage anyone who mentions Linux without adding "praise be to Linus" afterwards do NOBODY any favors.
However, I just started using a multi-threaded newsreader (MT-Newswatcher for MacOS) and have found that while the first thread of binary downloads is still capped at 15k/s, the 2nd download thread stays up at around 28k/s.
Possible solution--just run many download threads at once. (Note that I can't guarantee that the NNTP server speed is capped, but given that it tops out at 15 k/s at all times of day, with no variation, while the rest of the connection is damned speedy...it seems quite likely.
I have hit 400kps, but its very inconsistent. And the downtime is horrible.... the cable modem goes down several times a day, sometimes for just a few seconds, sometimes for over a day. I'd rather have 128kps DSL that worked and was consistent, rather than cable modem going up & down more often than a Viagra addict.
---- I made the Kessel Run in under 11 parsecs.
What defines their central office?
Do they only guarantee their bandwidth to the local central office or router?
For example, my university gives 10mbit access to all students, but the students eventually share the same pipe(s) that go out to the internet.
I can get 10mbit/second internally, but if the university guarantees (money back of course) that i can get 10mbit outside of the network, then i *want* it.
If they don't guarantee 10mbit outside the university network, then so be it..
Back to the real world: if you guarantee everyone gets 384kb/sec to the central office, so what. Any provider can do that and still not have enough to go *outside* the central office.
I wish @home would guarantee a rate as well, since inside the @home network (same city for example) I get worse rates than fast sites such as wuarchive, sunsite, etc.
Yeah, and VDSL (don't you wish you had it!) is Very Damn Slow Line. The generic form, xDSL of course, is eXtremely Damn Slow Line.
Of course, cable Can Also Be Lagging Evily.
Well I live in the Good Ol US of A and I connect every day at 26400 with my 56k modem... I would give my left arm to connect at 49333....
This is beginning to sound like one of those comic routines:
Man 1: We had it tough when I was a kid. We lived in a cardboard box behind a Chinese restaurant. Our only source of food was the dumpster where the restaurant threw its moldy discards.
Man 2: Luxury! We aspired to a cardboard box. By the time my childhood was over, we had sold every vital organ in our bodies for food.
etc.
"If I have seen further than other men, it is by stepping on their glasses." - Michael Swaine
It is possible to use the SBC DSL link and use another ISP as the link to the internet. Often this will result in higher effective bandwidth.
Most likely the email rate the complainant measured was the result of server load - rather than a bandwidth limitation. (It also makes a difference what time of day speeds are measured; the heavier the traffic the slower the shared connection runs.
The Anonimous coward that copies your comments (with signature, no less) is still getting moderated up, this time as "Insightful"
Yes, this give us Insight as to how the moderators work: Just read the first post on a thread and go on.
Kilroy was here!
The problem is, how are the customers going to prove that SBC intentionally lowered their speed? They can always claim the network is overloaded, etc. I've always found that SWB is pretty good at dodging the bullet.
DSL = Damn Slow Line.
at least in this case.
I need a TiVo for my car. Pause live traffic now.
in my dealings with SBC they were overwhelmed - and i believe this is partly due to their own errors. the campaign of offering free installation drove SBC in Houston to being 2 months behind on appointments - when they finally called to confirm that i still had an appointment, i had already been using RR for a month!
so i guess it would not be that odd to find that SBC is having rate problems and that in some managers short-sightedness they might have capped the rates. as i understand it, breaking out the line at the router is expensive and time consuming, of course, SBC is a big ass Co.
IMHO - if you can get it, go RoadRunner - i have yet to have problems and it has been three months on CounterStrike bliss!
/* Half alive and half dead too, work is for suckers and the sucker is you. - "Half-life" by Local H*/
While I understand how the plaintiffs feel in this case, and intentionally lowering speeds might not be a nice thing for a DSL company to do, I can't see how a suit like this could be taken seriously. Has a law been passed that I'm not familiar with which outlaws such an action? If people aren't happy with their DSL service, why can't they just switch providers?
blah blah
mount
fuck verizon (formerly known as bell atlantic)
The way they do this (I work an ISP offering DSL, so I'm familiar with this) is that the ISP connects high-speed ATM circuits (typically DS3) to a local or regional network maintained by the local carrier. ATM traffic is aggregated on these local/regional networks to reach this point. From the connection point, the ISP may further aggregate ATM traffic (or not), but ultimately all the ATM virtual circuits terminate on an ISP router. This router is then connected to the ISP backbone.
From the backbone router, traffic is mixed in with 100s of other service types. It may be prioritized or throttled by service (@Home does this); it may be subject to IP or ATM QOS; it may get stuck in public peering; or it may flow freely. Any of these factors, most of which have to do with sufficient capacity being provisioned, may get in the way of good service at the backbone level.
A "good" ISP allocates sufficient IP backbone capacity, and has good peering arrangements with other ISPs, minimizing latency, hops, and packet loss. A "good" LEC (either ILEC or CLEC) allocates sufficient regional ATM capacity to get cell loss damn near zero. A "bad" carrier doesn't sufficiently anticipate demand, or oversubscribes the hell out of it, and you get slow service.
In this particular case, I would suspect that SBC.net isn't smart enough to throttle capacity at the mail or news servers (though I suppose they could, using Packeteer or some such). It's much more likely that these servers themselves have a poor connection to the SBC.net backbone, and congestion is causing delays.
So does the suit have merit? Unclear. Unless SBC advertised a guaranteed service speed for the mail and news services, I would doubt it, but IANAL (and IAAISP) so take this with a big shaker of salt.
It does make their Bandwidth Hogs commercial look kinda stupid, though.
sulli
sulli
RTFJ.
> I praise the Sun god "Ra" every day
Me too!
Sun God, Sun God, Ra! Ra! Ra!
He likes that one.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
I have not been able to watch a movie on my digital cable box in SV for 2 months. It will either blank out and say
"Please be patient, the channel will be back shortly"
, or the picture will start to lose bandwidth and you can actually see what the cable box attempts to decode with only 1/23 of the data (read green bars and artifacts).
Course now I have every single movie channel out there as consolation from AT&T CS, but I can't watch any of them longer than 30 minutes without an interuption.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Last time I checked, the SBC DSL offering in Houston was for 384 (minimum) downstream (up to 1.5MB/s, if you had a good line), and 128 fixed upstream.
Note this is the guaranteed rate from your premesis to the local SWBell CO. There, you get patched onto SWBell's local ATM service, which connects you to the "ISP" part of their business.
It sounds like these people are complaining specifically that they are only getting 128kb/s mail and newsgroup access. They don't complain about web access speed. This definitely would be feasible- SWBell could run newsgroup and mail access over different ATM virtual circuits, which would enable them to easily throttle bandwidth to different services they please.
I doubt they'll win the case- I'm guessing the SBC / SWBell service agreement doesn't make any guarantee about newsgroup or mail access speed. It seems a little nitpicky to me- you'd have to be doing some serious binary newsgroup stuff to have 128kb/s be an issue. Given how much more easily available pron is on the web, I'm not sure there there are many people would notice or care about this.
However, I'm not going to defend SBC's exploitation of vagueness in their terms of service... they need to be up-front about what they're doing. I judge this kind of thing by the "principal of least suprise"- you need to be explicit about things that are contrary to the natural assumptions people are likely to make. Given unspecified service terms, I don't think very many people would assume that newsgroups or e-mail would be bandwidth-limited.
BTW- I was an SBC ADSL customer for a year prior to moving to another city, and frankly I miss it. They were early on their install date (this was 18 months ago) and I was getting consistent 1 Mb/s, right on the fringe of the 12,000 ft ADSL limit. I'm not aware of any outages during the time I used it, and I was hosting a mailing list server on it full-time. I'm now in a neighborhood in Atlanta where my only choices are Northpoint (expensive, lower bandwidth) or Bell South (crappy service). Sigh...
Truth in advertising laws are why you get/got the fine print at the bottom of doll commercials saying "this doll doesn't actually walk or talk." Actually, nowdays, you don't even get that, and just see kids playing with dolls because people won lawsuits under truth in advertising laws because kids couldn't be expected to read the tiny print.
--
Ben Kosse
--
Ben Kosse
Remember Ed Curry!
Lawyers love class action suit: million plantiffs each getting $10. Total to lawyer: one third of the TOTAL $10,000,000. Sweet deal for the lawyer!
I promise that I will try my best to leave it behind, even wearing a false beard if there is the slightest possibility of fooling the rain. However, if it happens, don't be surprised.
128kb is pathetic no matter how you go about getting it.
... a sizeable city by anyone's standards :-)
:-)
You, my friend, should try living here in Scotland. I praise the Sun god "Ra" every day that I get connected at 49333!
This isn't somewhere in the Highlands either, it's Glasgow
Anyway: it's Friday night. I should be out chasing "burdz"
All of SBC is 384/128. I was a customer until I moved to a town wo/ DSL a month ago. Also, they garuntee you the speed. They don't explicitly say that it is only for HTTP transfers. They garuntee those speeds from them to the 'Net. They can't rewrite what they've already advertised and say it's only for certain services. Also, it's not 12,000. The ADSL specs say 17,500 feet. Most DSL providing ISPs say 15,000 to cover their butts in case someone right at 17,499 feet can't quite get it. How do I know this? I contract admin for an ISP that provides such services. In fact they also provide long-range DSL to customers many, many miles away. They drop the connection off onto a single channel in a T1 and route it back to their CO. How can they afford to do this? They are also the phone company and they own the lines in the ground.
I have extensively stuided DSL and Cable as a report for a class of mine, and my conclusion is as follows: DSL is IMHO a superior technology (more stable and resistant to sharing issues), but it is losing badly to cable because of the cheapness of DSl providers.
While many cable companies are far less than reputable *cough* @home *cough* at least they are willing to give the customer a reasonable amount of speed. Cable customers often boast about getting speeds of up to 300 kB/s, twice the quality of a full t1 line! Yet DSL providers remain stubborn and rude about the notion of giving bandwidth to its customers even a fraction of that. 500-600 kbps lines often cost as much as a cable connection, with SDSL reaching ludicrous triple digit prices. Swbell and affiliates are ironically the most free with bandwidth, promising 1.5 mbps (though usually delivering maybe 400-500 kbps on average, not to mention the horrid 128 kbps upload cap) at the cost of cable.
ADSL is a waste of technology only used by companies to cheat their customers out of bandwidth. Don't be fooled by the "asymmetric" in its name, upstream drastically affects downstream with ADSL: A friend of mine who uses BellAtlantic has download speeds drop from 80 kB/s to 15 kB/s while uploading at full speed. No doubt the same flaws exist in the other Bells and other adsl providers. A/SDSL can reach speeds of up to 10 mbps, yet companies refuse to give customers just amounts of bandwidth, often charging $500/mo or so just for the same bandwidth as cable. I am sickened my DSL providers and their attempts to cheat the customer out of bandwidth. No wonder other horrid companies like Time Warner and @Home can get away with Draconian service policies because no one wants to put up with the jewish bandwidth limitation pulled by SBC, GTE, and others.
I am a conservative business supporter, but I think companies do need a good kick in the bum every so often to keep them honest. Now is one of those times.
Emerson Willowick: Thinker, Writer, Human Being.
I currently run VerizonOnline DSL. It's great for almost everything (I NEVER had a 90 ping on a Half-Life server before!), but it seems that the speed between me and the SMTP server is cut down; I've noticed that it takes about 14 seconds to log on and send under 1k of data. Essentially, SMTP is like FTP when it comes to protocol structure (same 550 errors, hehe), but still, I've sustained faster connections while uploading to FTP sites (up to 11k per second, compared to 2k per second with 56k).
I think it's time for DSL providers to tune up their SMTP and POP3 servers, the most ignored of all the servers within an ISP's server closet. For once, respect should be bestowed upon the consumers. Enough with this money-grubbing race, it's time to respect the average joe in favor of the rich CEO.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Good customer service would dictate that ...
The point is, "the phone company", wherever you are, is granted a geographic monopoly.
Your silly little rules of market forces do not apply here.
I was the first paying customer of DSL in Northern Nevada. I'm happy with the final-mile portion. Words cannot describe my dissatisfaction with the ISP portion of the service -- I was overpaying at $10/month. Further, when I disconnected from the ISP I got a larger bill from them. I'm taking action, though, as described at the end of this screed.
I didn't wait for the lawsuits to start before I decided to do something about the problem. When several local ISPs got their ATM connections up and running here in Northern Nevada, I switched.
Oh, the complaint list is a long one:
I switch services on March 6, 2000, to an outfit called Pyramid.Net -- and I've been happy with the switch. Things haven't been perfect, but when I call things get fixed. Period.
SBC isn't finished with me yet!I used to be billed $39 for the DSL service and $10 for ISP service. When the total charges went up I took a closer look at my phone bill. There was the DSL charge of $39, which was correct. What wasn't correct was a charge by "Nevada Bell Internet Services" of just under $29.95 for ISP service I wasn't receiving. I never had a dial-up account, yet when I fired NBIS they "converted" my account to a dial-up account...without authorization. I reported the problem in June and again in July. Nevada Bell (the telephone company) says they can't do anything about it because NBIS is a separate company.
Indeed it is a separate company! It isn't listed anywhere -- not in directory service for California, Nevada, or Texas, not in the telephone books, not even on Switchboard.com! I even called the main customer numbers for Pacific Bell (CA) and Nevada Bell (NV) and they had no record of an address or phone number other than the 800 number that I had already unsuccessfully dealt with. When I spent a day tracking down exactly what was going on, I found that all four Internet Service companies in SBC-land are serviced from a single office in San Francisco! And the dispute resolution? That's with Pacific Bell. In San Francisco. California. WHERE I DON'T LIVE.
Now, it's almost the end of August, and the bill dispute is still unresolved.
But that's all right. Because of electrical deregulation here in Nevada, there is a PUCN docket item investigating utility billing and payment practices for all utilities here in the State of Nevada. I am registered on that docket. My input, based on this experience, is simple:any utility that places a charge on a bill needs to be responsible for the charge, have authority to take action on the charge including reversal instantly, and be accountable for the charge. When a charge is disputed, it is removed and the third-party billing company has to deal directly with the customer.
It's a myth. You HAVE to have an ISP to connect to the Internet. With out an ISP, it's like a wire hanging into nothingness. CIDR is just a way to agregrate/deagregate the old class-a,b,c structure of the Internet and allow more efficient allocation of scarce resources.
/24 or a full class-c. Anything smaller than that will be filtered. Filtering on the class-C boundary results in (at this time in our routers) a BGP database with 86500+-300 routes. Each BGP route-map takes ~15 Megs of memory, plus the main ip route table takes ~15 Megs as well. For example, a connection with 2 backbones would require 45 Megs of router memory. Allowing longer prefixes would significantly increase the memory requirements and reduce the speed for packets to pass through the router.
The Internet uses BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) version 4 for routing. BGP is not a routing protocol in the classic sense as much as it is a database protocol indicating what "route-announcements" the upstream routers from you can hear. You don't need to run BGP unless you have more than 1 connection to the Internet backbones. The smallest released BGP announcement is for a
The path of a packet in your DSL network would go something like this:
You send a packet out of your NIC. The cisco-675 acts as a bridge (common configuration) and sees that the packet is destined for an Ethernet host not on your network. It then forwards it out the DSL line. The DSL line either:
Passes through a splitter outside your house and is combined on the single copper pair going to the Telco.
or
Passes directly through the phone line. Your house phones may have filters on them to block out the DSL frequencies. (G.Lite)
Once in the Telco central office, you line comes into the MDF (Main Distribution Frame) and is cross-connected to a DSL MDF with two pairs. The DSL MDF splits off your DSL and routes the phone frequencies back to the MDF for processing as a voice call. (The reason for 2 pairs for each DSL MDF position.) The DSL MDF forwards your DSL frequencies to the DSLAM for processing.
This accounts for Layer 1 and 2 of the networking protocols. There are a few different ways to terminate the DSL into an ISP. The most common is to bundle the Ethernet bridged data from the 675 onto an ATM PVC (Asynchronous transfer Mode Private Virtual Circuit) of a high-bit-rate ATM circuit. (DS1/DS3/OC3 depending on the size of the DSLAM) PVC's are mapped from DSLAM positions to (from the Telco perspective) subscriber PVCs and aggregated out to an ISP. The ISP will usually use equipment to terminate each PVC as a separate virtual ATM LANE (LAN Emulation) circuit. The termination equipment looks like just another Ethernet device to your 675. Usually your 675 will run PPPoE across this virtual circuit to provide authentication and accounting. I know that GTE limits the number of hours you can be connected to the PPPoE server. The PPPoE server acts just like a modem in a modem rack. Once the session is established, the packet is passed through the normal Internet infrastructure like any other packet. Once a packet reaches the distant host, a reply packet is passed back. If will usually pass router-to-router via default-gateway connections unless it reaches a BGP speaking router, in which case, an actual routing decision will be made. Once the packet reaches the PPPoE server, it will reverse the above list.
In short, if you don't have an ISP, you won't have a termination for the LANE session. Your packet will stop there.
Right on! Linus is not a god! He is a mere mortal, just like you and me, and as a mortal, he makes mistakes. How many mistakes? Count the times that Linux users around the world have seen the words: "Segmentation Fault - Core Dumped"
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer