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Dangers in the DSL World
shanec writes "As a former NorthPoint subscriber, eagerly awaiting the conversion to Rhythms, this article about the potential of Rhythms, and Covad going down also scares the #$^* out of me!" I think the article is a little inflamatory, but it does underscore a disturbing situation.
All succesful technologies make initial revenues from the sex industry. It happened with VHS, it happened with Pay internet, it happened with the printing press, even the telegraph. The need for sex has meant that people will spend a lot on this
But DSL is aimed at the typical consumer - the family man with 2.6 children. He isn't going to pay a lot for a service like that.
Until DSL is used primarily for this purpose it will make a loss. I guarentee
The reason why DSL and Cable Companys are going out of business so quickly is the factthat they cant cope with the traffic costs of the users. I think the real issue here is the stranglehold on bandwidth price that the major telco's hold as well as the tight restrictions which governments place on communications startups by charging crazy prices for frequencies and skyspace for sattelites (note: the 3G bandwidth prices).
:)
Some of the blame also falls onto users who like to sap the system for everything they can get. I myself cost my ISP about $600 a month in data while i only pay $40. They have to rely on users who only use the service for picking up email and doing a bit of browsing every so often.
Whether its good or bad, technology like P2P and Napster is quickly turning most home users into a bandwidth abusers. However I see this as the providers fault for not having stricter rules. Its fairly clear that we *need* more bandwidth, faster and cheaper access as we become more reliant on multi-media intensive applications.
This is all good if governments and major Telco's would play the game too.
Flames totally welcome, please reply with your economical analyses on this problem
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Unlike Northpoint, which served customers over a large number of different ISPs (which themselves had different DSL providers depending on region), a majority of Rhythms users are with Telocity, and a majority of Telocity's users are on Rhythms network. If Rhythms should have to sell out, I would suspect that Telocity would be there immediately to buy them out, possibly getting other ISPs invovled to help out.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Personally, I got so sick of Charter Cable's outages and price hikes, I dumped them, went for Satelite TV DISH Network (MUCH MUCH MUCH MUCHO better signal quality), and DSL for internet services. (PacBell).
DSL was a pain in the ass to set up, 6 weeks of futzing back and forth, but once it was set up, I haven't had even a hiccup. Speeds are consistent, both down and up.
Plus, I don't have to deal with the pain of sending money to a monopoly I hate.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
No, Gore took California anyway, would have made no difference in the national outcome.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
There will be more ISPs than DSL wholesalers, and the geogrpahical distribution of their customer base will be different, too, so wholesale makes sense.
DSL wholesalers will be able to rent more lines from the local telco, and do it cheaper.
Being a DSL CLEC is a specialty, so is being an ISP.
Some ISPs, like AOL, MSN, or Earthlink, will not become CLECs themselves. Wholesale is the only way for these ISPs to use DSL.
So much for theory: Unless you are AT&T, Sprint, or Qwest (which is in part a baby Bell), you do not have the scale to build-out and compete. If you are smaller, you better be the ISP and keep all the margin to yourself, you better offer voice because there actually is a margin for voice, and you better concentrate on business customers, like XO, Network Telephone, MPOWER, etc., but even these will have some failures among them.
The local telcos (ILECs) are not blameless, but there are many other factors, like EZ credit and then no credit for CLECs that can really screw things up. Some CLECs were badly run. And if you know which business model really works there is a Nobel Prize in economics in it for you. Even the ILECs and big IXCs are up to their ears in debt, and the CLECs providing voice lines are successfully cream-skimming the high-margin business customers from the ILECs even as the ILECs are inflicting pain on the DSL wholesalers and ISPs in residential DSL.
I wrote parts of this stuff
...and not provided by Flashcom, if you're referring to the DSL circuit; Flashcom are an ISP, not a CLEC.
I have (yes, have, present tense) DSL service with Flashcom as the ISP and Pac Bell as the circuit provider. (I first tried ordering DSL through Pac Bell Internet. They said "we'll get back to you in 5 business days" which, as I expected to be the case, they didn't. When I called them back, they gave me some crap about "you're too far from the central office" and "we don't have the facilities". I then tried Flashcom who managed to get me, within a few weeks, DSL service using Pac Bell as the provider of the DSL circuit, so Flashcom managed to do what Pacific Bell Internet hadn't managed to do - get me a circuit from, err, umm, Pacific Bell.)
Until recently, the circuit (from Pac Bell) has worked with few glitches. Recently, the circuit has been less reliable - the modem has been having problems getting sync; power-cycling helps, but sometimes it had problems even after power-cycling, but picking up my phone and hanging up appeared to have cleared them up.
My phone has also been somewhat noisy of late; I don't know if these are symptoms of the same underlying problem, but I'm loath to call Pac Bell because I'm afraid they'll "fix" it by, for example, noticing that my phone line gets hooked up to some weird device when it arrives at the central office, and disconnecting it - hey, guys, that weird device is called a DSL splitter, don't just disconnect it.
The Internet part of the service has generally worked pretty well; there was a mail problem a while ago due to the mail system bogusly thinking I was over quota, but that was a screwup by Critical Path, to whom Flashcom outsourced their mail services, and it's pretty much Just Worked since then.
Flashcom technical support, for a while, was slow about answering the phone, but recently they've been pretty good - I wonder whether somebody at the bankruptcy court came in and cracked the whip, especially because...
...the biggest Flashcom problem I've had is getting them to charge services to my credit card; they stopped charging me last July or so, and I've been calling them over and over again to get them to start charging me again (I don't want them cutting my service off because "I haven't been paying them"), and they finally manage to figure out how to change my account, which may also be the result of court-ordered cleanup.
(At least Pac Bell bills me, not Flashcom, for the DSL circuit charges, which is, I suspect, good, as it means Pac Bell, unlike the CLECs that Flashcom were using, is actually getting paid for the circuit. I suspect the CLECs, unlike the Baby Bells, had little or no infrastructure for billing individual consumers, and relied on the ISP to do that, which meant that if the ISP didn't pay their bills, they were screwed - which is, as I understand it, one problem the CLECs were having.)
So I'm reasonably happy with Pac Bell's DSL circuit, although, of late, I've been less happy, but, based both on general horror stories I've heard, and on a suspicion that the voice people may not have much of a clue about DSL, I'm somewhat loath to tell them about it.
Others may have had less luck with their DSL circuit.
The quality of their DSL circuit may have nothing to do with the quality of their Internet service; the ISP side of the house may, for example, have less of a clue than the DSL-circuit side of the house.
This sounds like a mangled version of what I've heard was the story of a specific model in the System/360 line, the Model 91 (or maybe it was first called the Model 92).
The Model 91 (or 92) was announced as a number-crunching supercomputer model, perhaps before it was actually read; this note on another IBM supercomputer project says
This may have been a preemptive strike against the CDC 6600, which, according to this note, was announced in 1964 and shipped in 1965.
As far as I know:
They call it consolidation if the smaller are gobbled up by the larger ones.
This doesn't seem to be one of those.
Just hope AOL doesn't buy them!
// yendor
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It could be coffe.... or it could just be some warm brown liquid containing lots of caffeen.
Actually, an ADSL line is asymmetric for technology reasons. While it's true that the LEC's don't like the idea of you running high-volume servers, the lower upstream rate is actually a pleasant side effect for them rather than a piece of the design.
You see, when you have big bundles of copper coming back into the CO, there are issues with crosstalk that have to be dealt with due to the density of the bundle, combined with the fact that the upstream signals at that point are fairly weak (since they've already made the trip from your house to the CO). Such crosstalk is easier to avoid at lower line speeds (say, 90 kbps) than it is at higher line speeds (such as 640 kbps). When sending data downstream, crosstalk isn't an issue, because by the time the downstream signals have degraded, they're already at the subscribers' homes and businesses, on individual cables.
ECI Telecom has an excellent presentation on the issues facing ADSL distribution which I highly recommend reading.
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I can't see anybody making money off consumer broadband Internet access, where there's an atmosphere of commodity pricing.
The real payoff will come when companies can successfully offer "bundled services" -- high-speed Internet, digital television, digital phone, all over the same wire, for one (not-so-low) monthly fee. That way, the provider can have their customer paying for TV while he surfs the Internet, paying for Internet while he's talking on the phone.
The only companies that have a viable shot at making that a reality, though, are gigantic telecommunications conglomerates that have interests in all these disparate areas. Read: somebody like AOL Time Warner.
I think what we're going to see is continued consolidation in the DSL market, with all the smaller providers and CLECs being either bought outright, or else going out of business and having their assets auctioned off to the larger players. The larger players will get larger and larger, until eventually we will be left with only a couple massive giants trying to offer every consumer in America the digital communications future we've all been dreaming of (cough).
My votes: AOL Time Warner and our old telco friends, AT&T.
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Breakfast served all day!
It's in their NorthPoint update page (http://www.xo.com/savemydsl/), item number 3. I also got an e-mail from them about it last Friday, and a snail mail on Monday, along with a phone call at home as well. Their plan is to move Home Office users to Telocity, 640K/90K ADSL if we so choose.
Home Office/NorthPoint service users are off-contract as of 4/27 (free dial-up until then if desired, woo-hoo), I'm not sure if they used other providers for that as well, but it's no longer a product offering in any form. I'd assume that if they offered it through Covad or their own network, those customers won't be dumped but they aren't adding any new ones.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
A large part of the problem is the structure that DSL is sold under. The DSL infrastructure CLECs all have to lease their unbundled copper from the ILEC, who is generally also in the DSL business as well and has a financial incentive to make the process as difficult as possible (eliminating the competition). Then the CLEC doesn't (except for Covad's Covad.net) even sell directly to the consumer - all they get to take is a middleman's bite without the retail markup. That retail markup, un turn, is very low because the ILEC is competing with a lower cost basis and driving the price down.
Business-grade DSL (SDSL with speeds of 768K and up) could theoretically be sold at higher margins than consumer-grade DSL, since business DSL is a market the ILEC's are avoiding (they don't want to cannibalize the lucrative T-1 business). This would give the DSL CLECs a chance to make some actual profit per line - but the catch is that they all built out their networks in the pre-2000 funding market and need a higher volume than just small business DSL can readily provide. So they all have been trying to land consumers for the cash flow (though the margins are nonexistent), only to lose money on every one (but they make it up in VOLUME!).
Covad may have a shot at survival just because they'll probably be the last national-scale DSL CLEC standing. A few smaller, regional-scale companies may be able to find niches as well, though it failed miserably for Vitts up here in New England. And through smart business (and/or deep pockets) some ISP's that offer DSL may be able to make a living - Telocity and Speakeasy have a pretty good chance (deep pockets for Telocity, and conservative growth plans at Speakeasy), as do companies like XO that have DSL as a single offering out of many.
There are companies that can make a profit with DSL, but they can't do it by going up against the ILEC. ILECs are on a completely different scale, with comparatively unlimited funds to write off while they crush you.
My own high-speed odyssey began with Flashcom/NorthPoint in mid 1999, and I stayed with them until it was obvious that Flashcom was on the way down (I had pretty good service and the price was decent). I switched to XO (for the deep pockets - Craig McCaw is their sugar daddy), and they provisioned a 768K SDSL line (for a little less than Flashcom was charging for 200K). It was also with NorthPoint, though - the Verizon merger fell through while the install was under way, ironically. I had no problems until NorthPoint went dark last Thursday evening, and XO announced they were getting out of the Home Office business.
So last Friday morning I called AT&T Broadband to see about cable - I live in Salem MA where cable Internet has only been available for about a month. They had a better price, free installation, and could come install this past Monday, which they did. So I simply moved my DNS to Zoneedit (which supports DDNS), and was back on the Net before my inbound mail from the weekend timed out and bounced. AT&T Roadrunner (my service) has no particular restriction on what I do with my line or if I run servers - the only restrictions are that I not run any commercial services with my servers and that I not do anything illegal. No problem. They also block the NetBIOS ports by default, though you can have them unblocked if you really want. And they don't "support" NAT routers, but they don't restrict their use. In fact, when I read the MAC address to the fellow registering my router, he asked me which model router I had and how I liked it (he recognized the vendor ID). He also set up a host mapping for me as well.
What this implies is that ultimately the more "progressive" cable ISP's (like RoadRunner) will get a lot of the business that would otherwise have gone to DSL providers when you have a choice as consumers become more informed (gradually) and home networking becomes more popular. Where there are no choices, you'll have to settle for an @Home-type ISP or whatever the market brings you, which is a pity. Your only other choice will be DSL from the ILEC unless you're a mid-sized business and therefore have SDSL for around $200 and up from a niche CLEC as an option.
Or dialup. Isn't that encouraging?
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
We're in the situation where ILECs are going to underprice CLECs out of the DSL business, and form an actual monopoly (together with poorer performance).
This is thanks to everyone who believes in the concept of "natural monopoly," that lead to ILECs being granted monopoly franchises by local governments to wire up telephones.
If you think the DSL debacle is bad, wait for the other "regulated monopolies" like power and cable...
A month or two ago Molly Ivans had a column about all this that told how the California utilities sold off all their generating facilities under this alleged de-regulation plan, so that now Pacific Gas & Electric --that is the company that actually sells the electricity to the consumer -- is paying out the wazoo for electricity that it buys wholesale and sells retail and crying to everybody that will listen about how it's suffering and loosing money, hoping for the state to bail them out, but meanwhile PG&E's parent company, which owns generating facilities, is raking it in hand over fist, charging their own subsidiary whatever they can get away with.
I haven't seen any mention of this aspect of California's de-regulation problem mentioned or published anywhere else.
Apparently the plan is to move all of the actual assets out of the publicly visible part of the company and get the taxpayers to bail it out while the PG&E stockholders watch their investment shrivel up to a worthless husk as the parent company uses those assets to keep on making money.
She closed the column with a quote from someone whose name escapes me at the moment, but the essence of his remarks was that they were finding a way to socialize losses and privatize profits.
Too bad Molly was out sick with breast cancer during George W.'s campaign. Having covered Texas politics for years, including his term as governor, she could have turned out some great columns about him last year that might even have made a difference in the outcome.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Wasn't that a law that PG&E lobbied for? Or at least the people who wound up owning the parent company lobbied for?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
As someone who was affected by the northpoint fiasco and recently re-signed with another DSL company despite the lower costs of cable solutions, I think I can shed some light on the subject.
DSL is a tremendously important technology because it brings you greater than T1 performance (both download AND upload) at a fraction of the cost of a T1. This scares the sh*t out of incumbant telecoms- They have ZERO reason to spend money buying DSL equipment only so that they can make less money on data services.
Local and national telecoms have, as far as I can see, done everything in their power to prevent DSL technology from taking hold. When independent startup (rhythms, northpoint, covad, etc) companies attempt to go around the stalling telecoms and provide the DSL service that customers demand, their job is made as difficult as possible due the local telco's control of CO's.
At the same time that the incumbant telcos are sabotaging independent efforts to offer DSL service, they are telling their current and potential T1 customers how unreliable and poor DSL solutions are (First hand experience here). It's a brazen display of market power that should give anyone pause. There's a reason why AT&T on one hand declined to smoothly transition Northpoint's business DSL clients, and on the other hand sent out letters to @work businesses offering to "upgrade" them to a T1. AT&T sends the message of their own making loud an clear- DSL is "unstable", buy our expensive T1's like everyone else. It's a total racket.
The only vision that incumbant telcos have for DSL is in a crippled ADSL form. Unsurprisingly, this is very similar to their vision for cable modems.
ADSL, and asymetric cable modems, *by design* turn a generic internet connection into a consumer-only connection. Don't let the marketing fool you- This isn't a feature. Your ability to publish information is strongly and arbitrarily curtailed.
Ever notice how you can pay more money for faster download speeds with cable modems, but your upstream stream is always the same? Haven't you ever wondered why *no* decent upstream bandwidth is advertised by cable companies? Most cable and ADSL providers even go further than this and explicitly forbid "servers" in their terms and conditions. Why is this? Certainly it's not a question of bandwidth, since they are handing bandwidth out left and right (so long as it's downstream).
This effort to "consumerify" as many internet services as possible has far reaching affects besides simply protecting the inflated revenues of T1 sales. It effectively takes away your press. The harder Time Warner makes it for people to self-publish on the internet, the less competition will exist for their own offerings.
I'm not saying that everyone would want to publish information on the internet, or that people who really want to publish on the internet won't be able to, but the "war on upstream bandwidth" does weigh the dice in the favour of media and telco interests.
People don't demand one-way bandwidth- A feature that would truly be in the customer's interest would be a protocol where you could dynamically configure upstream and downstream bandwidth from a fixed pool. I find it highly suspicious that *no* cable company or telco-operated DSL service provides even an option for increased upstream bandwidth. It's certainly not a question of demand.
Anyway, I've ranted long enough on this, and it's just going to be marked flamebait anyway. But I'm voting with my wallet, and I'm giving money to companies who are stepping up and offering SDSL because because I believe that it's important, and I'm not going to sell out to AT&T or Verizon or roadrunner or @home, who are manipulating the low end of the bandwidth market to turn us all into happy little consumers.
-DM
It's sad to see cable vs DSL degrade into a rather stupid bragging match about bandwidth per dollar. I don't see it as being about technology, it's all about terms of service. I seldom hear about a cablemodem provider that's static-IP and server friendly. Most are cold at best, and openly hostile at worst (DHCP-delivered RFC1918 addresses, NAT, port scanning, "registered" MAC addresses and so on).
DSL on the other hand, generally has easy (albeit often more expensive) access to static IPs and I have yet to hear of a DSL provider with "no services" rules. Basically it's IP dialtone that you can do with what you like.
Generally speaking, the DSL providers are interested in providing common-carrier style communications connectivity while the cable people seem more oriented towards their traditional business model -- providing a one-way conduit of entertainment. If the cable model fits you, then use it, but I suspect that most people with more than a web-centric interest in computers/internet would prefer a service that wasn't as rigid and one-dimensional as cablemodem seems to be.
I don't have a gripe with the technology. Based upon what I've read, cablemodem users generally enjoy higher bandwidth than DSL and without as many of the tech limitations. If cablemodem could deliver the *service* I get from DSL -- static IP, no server limits, reverse DNS for my IPs -- at the usual cable bandwidths, I'd jump on it in a heartbeat.
Amen, brother. We started with someone local here for our ISDN connection, since they were local, I could drive for 10 minutes and actually shake hands with their DNS admin, postmaster, etc. They set us up with a very good deal, were very easy to talk to, and were very fast. Last year they got bought by Venture, and started to slide downhill. Last fall they gave their beancounters the ability to modify their router's configuration. Some beancounter didn't understand exactly what our billing terms were, so it dropped our subnet from their routing tables, and disabled our account. Took most of the day to get them to fix it. And, of course, ol' Mr. Beancounter came in the next morning and fucked us again.
Now Venture has been bought/merged/morphed into CoreComm, and they want us to sign a new contract at an over 200% rate increase. Because of this, we are going to snuggle up to the beast, and get a T-1 from AT&T (shudder).
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Speakeasy, and other companies like it, like my service provider, Telocity, do not actually provide the DSL service. Speakeasy goes through Covad, Telocity through Rythms. Basically, all the DSL service is provided by only a handful of companies. We had NorthPoint until recently, now there's only Covad and Rythms, not counting the ILECs (Ameritech, Verizon, whatever)...
If Rythms and Covad fold, my only alternative would be to go through Ameritech. Cable modems just started being available in my area, by I don't like the idea of being behind a router with 30 of my closest neighbors.
My journal has hot
When it comes to running servers/services, I called and asked, and after I explained what they were to the lady, she told me they had NO policy regarding anything like that, so go ahead. She may not have had any idea what she was talking about, but she did tell me it was OK
Dude, if she doesn't even know what you're talking about, the likelihood that she actually knows what the policy is in the first place is pretty slim. I checked with MediaONE, Time Warner and ComCast, all have policies against running any sort of server.
The main problem with sharing bandwidth, though, is that everyone in your neighborhood is behind a router with you... There's no security. Services and protocols that are normally not accessible via the Internet because they aren't routeable (Netbios, for one) are available to everyone in your neighborhood. This is particularly a problem if you run Windows and do not use a firewall (90+% of all cablemodem subscribers run Windows and have no firewall)
I've also heard that with some cablemodem services, they put you behind NAT and don't give you a real IP. I don't know which ones do that, or really if they do that, but that's what a guy who used to install for Comcast told me they did.
My journal has hot
I don't know anything first hand, but I saw this on comp.lang.ada last week:
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> So if the CA power companies were "properly" deregulated, I have no doubt that the normal residential customer would be taking in the rear with no lube. Of course I notice before these sorts of deregulation occur, that you see ads on TV and in your bill about "how competition through deregulation will cut costs to you..." Of course these ads are paid for by the regulated entity, so I am skeptical.
That's exactly what happened in California. People who followed the legislation in the media thought they were being treated to a sure-fire 10% rate cut. Almost no one knew that the legislation included spending $28.5 billion in taxpayer's money to bail out invester-owned utility companies.
Also, it's deceptive for the utilities to blame the problems on "incomplete" or "botched" deregulation, because the utilities were the ones who wanted the legislation. When part of the public found out where the shaft was headed, they set up a proposition to void the legislation between the time it was passed and the time it took effect, but the utilities spent something like $40 million (IIRC) on ads against the proposition. A spokesman for one of the groups pushing the proposition said that the utilities were outspending them by 10:1 in PR on the issue. It is perfectly obvious that the utilities wanted this legislation, and wanted it bad.
I posted a longer summary of all this here, complete with links to sources, several months ago. Elsewhere in this thread, unitron mentions that he hasn't seen the subtext story anywhere except in one column, and he's correct that the media aren't telling anything useful. But if you spend 30 minutes or an hour with a search engine you can turn up some interesting facts. I found a study done after the legislation passed but before it went into effect, showing that none of the vendors were interested in competing in the residential power supply game, so it should have been apparent even back then that deregulation wasn't really going to magically lead to competition that would result in lower prices.
This could have been averted, if the media had picked up on what some people knew even back then. Perhaps it could still be averted in Texas, if the citizens were informed and the politicians cared what the citizens think this long before the next election.
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Well, here's my experiences:
Dude, if she doesn't even know what you're talking about, the likelihood that she actually knows what the policy is in the first place is pretty slim. I checked with MediaONE, Time Warner and ComCast, all have policies against running any sort of server.
My cable provider officially has policies against servers. In reality, they don't care. Although if any server started to pull a lot of bandwidth they'd probably care.
The main problem with sharing bandwidth, though, is that everyone in your neighborhood is behind a router with you.
Got news for you. At some point, you're always sharing bandwidth. There's a shared router somewhere. Cable just does it sooner. If the cable company is good about it, they will split nodes when they get congested. If not, they won't. But trust me, DSL companies can screw up DSL too.
There's no security. Services and protocols that are normally not accessible via the Internet because they aren't routeable (Netbios, for one) are available to everyone in your neighborhood.
Sorry, but this is just BS. Any cable company that has their hardware configured like this is run by a bunch of morons. Most sane companys configure the local switches to block broadcast and non IP traffic, which means I can't access my neighbors netbios shares anymore than you can.
I've also heard that with some cablemodem services, they put you behind NAT and don't give you a real IP.
Has nothing to do with cable. Around here at least, my cable service is a real IP and my DSL service is NAT.
In the end, it all depends on the company. If it's a good cable company, you won't have to put up with overcommited bandwidth or NAT BS, or whatever. If it's a bad one, you will.
Same with DSL.
"I've also heard that with some cablemodem services, they put you behind NAT and don't give you a real IP. I don't know which ones do that, or really if they do that, but that's what a guy who used to install for Comcast told me they did."
I'm with Adelphia 2-Way Cable, and they do this. Drives me _nuts_. No IP addy, no DNS server numbers, no _nothing_.
OTOH, the service works, and is reasonably speedy. I sure would be willing to drop another couple of bucks if it meant that I could have a static IP, with real DNS numbers to look stuff up against.
Redhawk
I don't know firsthand, so I may be talking out of my ass.. but reading the comp.dcom.*.dsl group up to last year, it seemed the safest bet for DSL service was the telco themselves. As soon as you add more layers of providors, you add more layers of woe: fingerpointing of who drops the ball, who should do what service, etc etc.
I'm currently cable modem, but the area I'm looking to buy a home is rural enough DSL will be my only real hope.* Given whatever options I have at the time, I'm betting I'll still stick with the local telco providor (BellSouth) and try to ride it out.
* sorry, I don't count satellite yet. Think it's still kinda impractical
-'fester
I don't care how my service comes, but this is what I want:
(1) minimum 384 kbps, both ways, 24 hours per day
(2) static IP addresses with reverse DNS set to my domain name
(3) permission to run (low-volume) servers
I haven't found any cable provide that has that, but Speakeasy DSL and Telocity DSL do.
Even DSL is going to be a shared node, depending on the ISP you get. Say they have 50 DSL customers and only a T-1 Uplink? At the price they are selling DSL some of the companies can't even afford that. It's shared, it's just a matter of where.
As far as servers go, who cares? AT&T has one server that scans for any unauthorized servers, and my portsentry firewalled that machine a long time ago. If they can't automatically test it, how will they know? And they do support Linux/Unix, although I am running FreeBSD without a hitch, and they understand that this stuff comes with servers already running.
I'm not familiar with other cable companies, but I know roadrunner in Houston does not require cable TV, and AT&T in Dallas/Ft. Worth does not require cable TV either. In fact, they will you give the local channels and the preview guide channel free with the cable service when they install it. They are two different companies too you must realize, if you call one to complain about the other, they transfer you or give you anothe 1-800 number to call.
DSL is not something as simple as sticking a DSLAM, and a DSLAM is actually a shared access node also. The phone wire itself must be update and in top condition, and IIRC DSLAMs can support about a T1 in total transfers at once, no matter how many people there are.
Well I agree on same-speed upload/downloads, but I've never had the need to upload anything large and as long as I can download at speeds much faster than my brother could on DSL at peak hours, I'm content. =)
My DSL provider, Reflex, was a company that decided not to work through the phone company's lines or the cable company's lines like most broadband providers. Instead, it was setting up wireless links to apartment complexes, then running its own lines through the whole apartment block. Then, when it couldn't keep up with the wireless connections started using temporary land lines of some kind. But the temporary land lines for the most part never got converted to wireless. I'm not exactly sure why they went out of business, but they sure seemed to grow fast. My bandwidth was even faster than they guaranteed, mostly reliable (about what you'd expect with DSL), and I had my static IP without NAT which I just loved.
s html
Anyway, a couple of weeks ago they let go 250 employees (most of the them) then just recently filed Chapter 7 bankruptcy. In other words the company is going away forever. Too bad for all those apartment complexes advertising DSL, all that dark (unused) wiring, and those 10,000 customers like me suddenly without our ISP.
I had to dig out my 56K (i.e. 40K) modem from my closet. I've been looking around for a good new DSL provider but I wonder if I'm better off just doing without the luxury. I think it would cost my at least $200 just to get hooked up and a ton of cash per month ($60 or more) if I want an ISP with a static ISP.
Unlike Northpoint, when you had Reflex for DSL you also had Reflex as an ISP as part of the regular price which was about $30 for the whole package (the lowest price package).
Article about Reflex going out of business here:
http://seattlep-i.nwsource.com/business/reflex30.
You're joking, right? PacBell Internet Services has, by far, the worst customer service I have ever experienced. I've been trying to get them to fix a problem with my connection (it goes down for hours every night), and not only has it not been fixed yet, but they won't even call me back even though I've asked them to every time. Their customer support people are generally not rude, but are clueless beyond belief and are unable to handle anything that falls outside their script.
I've given up on calling them about a week ago, but I did submit a complaint via the San Francisco/Oakland BBB. No response yet.
If you think that my terrible customer service experience is an isolated incident, I encourage you to take a look at the review at www.dslreports.com, and at their rating with the San Francisco/Oakland BBB (they claim that this company has an unsatisfactory record, and a pattern of ignoring customer complaints).
I thought so. I haven't been contacted by the original poster about my challenge. Therefore I declare his new status as "Big bag of wind."
Later,
ErikZ
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Here's another idea. If DSL providers actually policed their network, and culled all the script kiddies, nukers, DVD-downloaders, DDoSsers etc., they could save themself one hell of a lot of money on bandwidth charges to their upstream provider.
Regarding your comment: people (around here anyway) are willing to pay more for good service, in the broadband department. My recommendation will also improve this service, by freeing up bandwidth.
So:
1) remove lamers
2) actually charge a price that reflects the service's worth, not cut-price crap.
Neverrtfm> For that matter, can anyone help my clueless self with an idea why ppl would choose a DSL company(esp. one that has to go through another layer of ISP) over cable?
Well, here the only cable modem provider that is available in my area is Time Warner's Road Runner service. Ever since I moved to my new residence, the service has been horrible. I have seen latencies of >4000ms in the evenings, with some timeouts as well. My wife plays an MMORPG, because of this and packet-loss (stand back! I've got traceroute and I know how to use it!) she sees 16 - 30 second delays during game play. I've seen downloads (my house friends house, 200 feet apart) range in speeds from 30kb/sec at the best (we have upload rate restrictions) to 30bytes/sec.
Cable modem is horrible once you get enough subscribers hooked up to the system (IMOE, in my own experience.) Even more outrageous, we were told this area was only at 60% capacity. Heavens help us when it reaches 90%.
Lastly, RR does *not* offer static IP's because they do not want people running servers. RR also runs weekly scans of their network, to catch the poeple who run servers and boot them from the network.
So tell me why I shouldn't want DSL service from someone like Speakeasy who doesn't care if I run servers and will even give me SLA with a specified CIR?
It is rapidly appearing that, if you don't own the wire all the way to the end-point, you can't survive. If you own the wire (cable, or copper), you can leverage the cost of that connection over the OTHER service(s) you provide (or you've already bore the burden of that physical media cost, therefore you only need to fund the new service, and not the service and the wire).
In DSL land, the ILECs, CLECs, and ISP's all have to have a markup, AND it has to fit within the 'Yeah,I'll pay that much per month' dollar amount; usually $40-$50/mo. At $13-$16 per user, per month, per service provider, that's not a lot of room for making money.
It's the same for phone-line based ISPs. Most of the mom-and-pop ISPs are toast, cause they can't compete with the AT&T $7/month for unlimited internet access AND $.07/minute long distance. They just don't have the leverage from other ventures.
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
There are 3 companies (not Bells) that have their OWN dsl equipment. Covad and Rythms have been mentioned, but don't forget about DSL.net. Unlike Speakeasy or Telocity, DSL.net is a DSL provider AND an ISP. I have a 1.5Mb SDSL line from them in Connecticut and have never had a problem with it (over a year now). They DO have a service level agreement that specifies exactly what I'll get and what they'll do. For markets that they don't have their own DSL equipment they partner with Covad. And I sleep easy, DSL.net has one of the best balance sheets of anyone in the industry. They had some lay-offs last year, but now they look good (look at their SEC filings online).
This is one of the reasons I'm planning on switching to a regional ISP...
I've been using USIT.NET, which got bought by ONEMAIN and then became part of EARTHLINK.
For this reason I plan on switching to a different ISP, one that is based here in Tennessee and doesn't appear to be going anywhere anytime soon. (I know people who work for them and the company seems very solid, even if relatively small.)
My logic behind switching to these guys (ISDN.NET) is that by getting DSL through them (along with web hosting services and a few other things) I'm supporting a competitor of Bellsouth.Net.
Even though Bellsouth is just reselling their lines to ISDN.NET, I like knowing that I didn't choose Bellsouth.NET directly. It's almost the only way I can stick my middle finger up to them.
I would've already dropped USIT/EARTHLINK if it weren't for the fact that I won't be able to get the DSL line until JUNE!
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
I've been running a large number of servers on a cable modem for well over a year now. Time Warner. No fuss.
(DSL is not available at the location the servers are.)
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You may have 1.5M/568K to the DSLAM at the local central office, but from there all the DSL customers on your carrier are aggragated on a single pipe (usually DS3 or better on a fiber ring) where the traffic is carried to the DSL provider's primary switch. This can be a choke point.
From there, traffic for all of the DSL customers of a given ISP is consolidated into an ATM connection (one PVC per customer, or a single PVC for all customers) where it is delivered over DS1 or DS3 to the ISPs DSL edge router. This is another point where capacity can be oversold. The ISP can 'overcommit' this circuit, provisioning a dozen DSL customers on a single T1 circuit that can barely handle the full outbound bandwidth of just one customer.
Lastly, the ISP can overload the CPU and bandwidth on their DSL edge router, their core routers, the segments that connect them, and the connection to their upstream providers.
Every commercial ISP and every DSL provider oversells their available bandwidth- it's the only way to make a profit at the low rates they charge.
If the oversale is reasonable (3-10x actual capacity) and most customers don't use their potential bandwidth, then nobody complains.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
These prices are strictly for delivery to an ISP, they do not include internet bandwidth, or the ATM DS3 circuit ($1K/month)
ADSL: $75 per month per customer, down to around $40 with several thousand customers.
SDSL at 1.5Mbps: $250 (down to $150 on volume) SDSL at 768: $200 (down to $100 on volume)
Notice that they cheapest possible ADSL rate is $40/month, which means that even without including the cost of internet bandwidth this is more expensive than your average bargain basement DSL provider.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
Sure! Look at the adult industry. Who do you think is making money, and has been making money all through this dot-com revolution and shake out?
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For those of you looking for a new DSL provider you can get offers quickly from many ISPs with our system at http://ispmenu.com.(end plug)
This is not correct. Yes, I'm being blunt.
The REASON this isn't correct is because of the design of a DSLAM. DSLAMs are made up of card shelves. Each card has X number of customers - I think that Covad SDSL cards allow 6, but don't hold me to that - and there are multiple cards per shelf. There's at LEAST one ATM DS-3 running off of each DSLAM into the Covad networks - Covad is what I have the experience with - and they add more pipe based on the number of users.
This CAN lead to problems, especially if 30 or so users decide to use their full bandwidth all of the time. DSL ISPs have ways of handling this, usually by warning them to stop doing it 24/7, or by shutting them down. Either way, with ATM circuits, you can have some five or six hundred people going over a single DS-3, and still only use about 20Mbit/sec worth of bandwidth on it.
As for the phone pair, it does NOT need to be up to date and in top condition; Harvard.net - one of the first DSL providers to go under, and I think exclusive to the Northeast - was buying "dry" pairs with no conditioning done to it from Verizon. DSL will run over crufty old alarm pair for fire alarms and the like; just don't expect it to stay up and running all the time. A lot of the DSL providers out there are now getting conditioned pairs to use for lines, but it's by no means necessary.
As for your brother's download speeds, that depends entirely on the ISP. If they've got an overloaded backhaul, or their transit to upstream providers is full, then peak times are going to suck. LOTS.
You thought that this sig was what you think that I thought you wanted me to think. I think.
The only purges that Covad has been doing are those where they're pulling gear out of thoroughly unprofitable COs - because, for instance, there aren't enough subscribers to afford the cage (we're talking two or three people in the CO here) - and the shutdown of service to those ISPs that are unwilling or unable to pay their bills to Covad. If anything, this made them MORE reliable as a long-term prospect. They dropped their dead weight, and their customer service at it's worst was light-years better than Northpoint's average - and still a bit better than Northpoint at it's best.
If someone got caught in a purge, then they went with a dinky little ISP that didn't pay their bills and didn't let it be known that they were in danger of losing connectivity. These providers - ALL providers that sold Covad DSL for that matter - were notified of the impending shutdowns. Covad even had a project set up to help customers transfer to new ISPs. Speakeasy was one of them - and it's still going on. (Semi-Disclaimer: I work for RCN, but Speakeasy is my DSL Provider. There's reasons, but most of it boils down to cost.)
Rule Number One of DSL: If your business relies on it's net connection, DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES USE DSL AS A PRIMARY CONNECTION! I cannot stress that enough! DSL has absolutely NO service agreements, beyond a guaranteed 80% of rated line-speed for "business" class SDSL circuits. DSL is great for the home, and good for a backup circuit, but don't think it's a T-1 for cheap.
Trust in the fact that, if ANYONE goes ANYWHERE anytime soon, it won't be Covad. They're running strong, they laid off a few people back about 6-8 months ago. After that, their support IMPROVED. They reorganized, and they're running better than ever. And their service is better, more reliable, and usually more intelligently-staffed than just about any of the local Telcos are. Do your homework on DSL, and you won't get burned.
You thought that this sig was what you think that I thought you wanted me to think. I think.
This isn't necessarily true. The local telcos are legally only able to charge a minimal fee to CLECs - Competitive Local Exchange Carriers, which is technically what a DSL provider is - of around $7 for the local loop. The DSL providers then turn around and sell access to their network for X number of dollars, plus a fee per circuit of - I THINK - around $40 per line. (This is what it was about a year ago; whether or not that's changed since then, I don't know.) On top of that, you get whatever else the ISP charges. The rates aren't cut that much really; you're looking at an over 300% profit on the loop charge alone, and I know that most DSL ISPs that are worth looking at twice are charging around $60 for a 608/128 line, $90 for 1536/384 lines, and around $50 for a 192k SDSL line, working up. (Highest I've seen is $450/month for a 1.5Mbit SDSL line with some real nice side perks.)
DSL is far from cut-rate; the companies involved just happened to jump in too early to gain the early ground on it. Support costs a lot for DSL, although that's changing with the new Rate Adaptive Error Correction software out there. My line had a hard short on it at one point about two months ago, that I found out about quite by accident. My DSL line was still up through it, and - having troubleshot for umpteen million DSL circuits - I know that a hard short on a SDSL line takes it down. (In case you're wondering, the reason it isn't applied is because it would break the guarantees of speed on an SDSL line. The error correction drops your speed to compensate for loss of signal strength.)
I agree that DSL doesn't really work - currently - but I don't agree that it's because of cut-rate pricing. These companies are making up lost ground, but they're doing it slowly, because they can't afford to tinker with it to get it to work better.
Semi-useless factoid for the day. Copper-based T-1s are usually HDSL, which is the oldest of the DSL types. It's the repeaters and switching equipment - along with the cost of the loop and REALLY strict Service Level Agreements - that make all the difference in the world.
You thought that this sig was what you think that I thought you wanted me to think. I think.
For starters, there's the old saw about the shared node. With DSL, you don't need to wonder what's going to happen to your bandwidth when the rest of the neighborhood wakes up and smells the fat pipe. Another big one is, 99% of the cable providers out there throw a fairly big stink when you try and run a server over a cablemodem - once they get around to noticing it. My DSL ISP - Speakeasy - has two restrictions: No porn websites, and no IRC Servers. (And even that they can overlook if it's a single-node server and not part of a network, I think.)
In addition to that, DSL is cheaper. How? What if I don't WANT cable TV? Most cable companies won't sell you cablemodem access without a TV subscription as well. (Rare, but true. One of my friends is stuck with this dilemma.) Also, DSL is available where many times cablemodem isn't. Reverse is also true, of course, but unlike cablemodem access, you don't need to upgrade the existing infrastructure to accomodate DSL. Just stick a DSLAM in a central office and start plugging in lines.
Lastly, very few cable companies want to give you the same bandwidth upstream as you have downstream, without paying a LOT of money for it. DSL is comparatively cheap for synchronous speeds.
Hope that answers some of your questions. Incidentally, line conditions for DSL and Cable both are much better than average in Seattle, since there isn't a couple hundred years of cruft in the way.
You thought that this sig was what you think that I thought you wanted me to think. I think.
We are about the only northpoint customer still alive.
Being that we're using them for business lines, I would GLADLY pay more money to have a stable service. I'm talking about SDSL not ADSL. ADSL is fine for the home user. Charge a bit more for SDSL and as long as it's bang for buck ratio is better than T1 I will buy it.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
As the other DSL providers go under I see the Speakeasy network grow. I had requests in for DSL from three providers for over a year, one folding, one just flat out ignoring all new requests and one not able to get the bell company around here to put in a line because you didn't go through the local bell company. I wonder how many of those smaller companies went under because of non-responsiveness of the bell companies?
Speakeasy took less than a month and service has been outstanding for the three months that I've had service.
DanH
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
UNIX - Not just for Vestal Virgins anymore
It won't be long before the companies that still exist as major internet players will be noticed again and everyone will be happy.
So...when can they install the fiber to my house?
--
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
The problem isn't that DSL doesn't work. It's cut-rate pricing offered by myopic providers to feed myopic customers that leads to a sudden boom followed by a bust.
Consolidation and streamlining will follow. The numerous competing technologies will eventually give way to a few popularly supported technology. (ADSL-G.lite and G.dmt standards.)
Unless alternative technologies offer clear cost/performance benefits, the standard will eventually be entrenched. Prices will go up for a while, but so will the quality-of-service. Eventually, improvements in the technology will stabilize the price, and the threat of new entrants will (hopefully) bring the prices down.
And, when the new technology is clearly superior, it then becomes the norm. The old (mature) technology dies away, or becomes relegated to lower price-points.
It was true for transportation -- steam-ships gave way to locomotives which gave way to airplanes. The pony express gave way to telegraphs which gave way to telephones. It was true for private communication networks with Telex giving way to early national private networks (Tymnet, EasyLink, and others that I don't even remember) which are giving way to the Internet.
In the long term, the free market will figure it out. In the meanwhile, sometimes, you're just stuck having bet on the losing technology.
I recently called up my DSL provider (Covad vice Toad.net) and asked about the whole situation since Northpoint was going under, and the whole nine yards. I had assurances from our DSL coordinator that Covad would at minimum, be around until late 2002 and is expected a rosier financial situation in early 2002. Granted, I only have 2 months left in my current apartment and don't have too much to worry about, but it's not like they're packing it up just yet, folks. Let's not get too freaked out yet.
So there I was. Naked. In a refrigerator. With a potroast on my knees. Smokin a cigar. That's when it got REALLY weird.
I think it is possible. The real problem is its improbable. There are at least two factors making it impossible to get anywhere with the DSL market. 1. The real promise of DSL is high quality, high speed internet connections, always on, always available. Unfortunately those that are rolling out DSL are not living up to the promise, in the way's that people expect. I have had both DSL and Cable Modem in the past year, actually I still do...infact my company has both, for different purposes. In general people expect DSL to live up to the promised speeds, with the reliability we expect from the Phone company(Say what you will, but I can remember at least 100 times the power has gone out at my house but the phone is still working, NO ONE lives up to the kind of service except the phone company). DSL is not POTS though, but we are told its a phone type tech so we expect that level of service from it. More so since its a phone tech for getting on the internet we expect it to cost the same as that 56K dialup we have been using for years. The more informed DSL might even recognize the technology shift, and resultant price increase for what it is(I do anyway) and expect to pay more for this kind of access, BUT not what the DSL companies want to charge, COVAD charging $359 for 1.5 Symetric is just way out of line.(I would pay up to $100, and think most others would too, $100 a month is well within the typical geek budget, $359 is alittle insane) Now hold on let me give you the reason I think this so, before you fly of the Flame handle at me. I have one of these $359 line from Covad, but I also have a AT&T/Mediaone(Whoever they are this week) cable modem at the same site(remember they are for different reasons, if your truely interested in the details I can fill them in later) for $39.99 a month a get 1.5 down, and a variable speed up which varies between 300-1.1 according to my monitors. The DSL is the rock soild connectivity to the site, the Cable modem serves other purposes really just an administrative connection that doesn't effect the datasteam of my customers. So basically what I can deduce from all this is a question of volume, and/or administrative costing being the problem. A good look at this reveals how to fit the situation. Any DSL company is reliant on the TELco(s) in the area to get that line to the users house/business(A fee that gets passed along to the customer, ever wonder why Verizon can give you virtually the same access as Covad at half the price, in the business market). Cable modem got around this it uses the Cable line thats been there for 20+ years now basically. They had to do some work on the backend, and on the poles to get Cable modem inplace, but it was almost seemless and required very little change in the last mile. DSL is all last mile. So this brings up the idea of volume. Draw your own conclusion here, but it seems to me that its alot easier for cable modem to scale up fast. DSL requires alot more changes to get up to that scale and costs alot more, all that cost has to be go someplace, the consumer. It doesn't have to though. Right now because DSL must pretty much be installed by the local Telco who if they are not your DSL provider are a competator with your DSL provider. This means higher costs all around. For install, for rackspace in the CO for DSlams, etc. How to fix this problem? The smae way the cable company did, they lay their own line(or at least contract for someone to do it), maintain their own facilities, and have their own backbone connections(more so with the Mediaone/AT&T merger, which BTW I think is a good thing, if they would take the cable modem networks to the next level, and offer enterprise level connections, which the technology is able to do, white papers on some of the cable modem models put them at 10 Symetric or higher) That leads to the other big problem for DSL not provided by the local telco(s) everyone around them competes with them. If they did the right thing and started building their own infrastructure, they would still have to buy bandwidth from somene who potentially competes with them either the DSL or Cable Modem market. How to solve this, take the backbone away from the big players, make it a common resource that all providers can get access to, for the same rates. And there you have it equal access for all, would make the maret flatten out, and then service would be king because everyone could fight fairly in the price war. DSL has way to many price barriers.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
I don't care how my service comes, but this is what I want:
(1) minimum 384 kbps, both ways, 24 hours per day
(2) static IP addresses with reverse DNS set to my domain name
(3) permission to run (low-volume) servers
I haven't found any cable provide that has that, but Speakeasy DSL and Telocity DSL do.
And what do you want to pay for it? $40 a month? $100 a month? What you want is equivalent (at least in the service provided) to frame relay... be prepared to pay for it. Also, remember that these services that you want are usually what businesses request. Did you notice that you can often get much better services if you look in their "Business Pricing" sections? That's because business want to run their own mail servers/websites/blah blah blah and they are willing to pay a premium to do so.
Most of what I've seen is nerdy guys (like me) and gals who want a fat pipe for no dough. Unfortunately for you and me, there are people/companies willing to pay $200 a month for the services you want... so why would the DSL providers ever sell it to us for less?
And that "well, then everyone will get DSL from them" is a retarded argument. Think about that... their network will be overtaxed, they won't be making money. There will be more demand than they can supply... so what do they do? Raise prices. That'll filter out the chaff...
And my guess is, the average nerd doesn't want to pay $179 a month. The point isn't whether the price per month is $200 or $2000. The consideration is how much are they paying now? $40 a month or so is reasonable for most, maybe even $70. But $179 is expensive, again, for most nerds. Some will have the money, and will get it.
I am not considering those who can actually justify the expense. I'm talking about Joe User who wants to run a Quake server for his buddies and maybe a related website.
NetBEUI may not be routeable, but NetBIOS most certainly is. How do you think programs like Winnuke work over the internet? Or Windows file sharing on an Intranet that has more than one subnet ?
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where there's fish, there's cats
I have been using Mindspring (Earthlink, whatever) for about three years as my dial-up service. When they released DSL about 8 months ago, I jumped on it, mainly because they offered free (DIY)installation, a free modem, and I could keep my existing email address, a big point for me.
Then it turned out, after I got everything, that I would have to use a completely different email address, and the only way I could keep my existing Email address was to pay an addition 19.95 a month, on top of the DSL fee. But, in reading the service agreement, I found out that they don't start billing you until the first time you logon with their username and password.
So I hooked it up, and logged it with my dial-up password. Worked like a charm. And I was only paying 19.95 a month (because technically I never 'activated' the service).
But alas, I got my bill last night and they finally caught on and charged me 49.95. So now it's time to think about a fractional T1 or somethig similar. I've had cable, and couldn't stand the service given by Time Warner, so that's out.
Oh how I miss the days of 2400...*sigh*
Random Musings
"The difficulty of taking on equipment, other than what your own network is designed for, is severe. There's almost no market for an arbitrary piece of equipment."
Apparently this guy has never heard of eBay. This is as good of a time as any, for just one company to pick up the slack and firesale prices as well as customers of some of these companies. Sure the market is grim right now but as history shows it cannot stay there, and should a company jump up and purchase the equipment and accounts, they could actually make money.
First off with the economy in a slow downturn, you'd save a heck of a lot more money buying surplus stuff from companies like these, at the fraction of a cost. Secondly you'd already have accounts from them as well, the question is whether or not DSL is actually a dead technology, and the answer is no.
Given the monopolization of the Bells over phone lines, this is the only issue truly affecting these companies. If customers aren't paying, then its the company's own fault, not the Bells.
All you need is one company to face the facts, sure the market is bullish, which also means no one is going to be spending an arm and a leg buying newer equipment and technologies for a while, so why not capitalize on whats in front of them right now. DSL isn't going anywhere, even if AT&T isn't buying any new DSL assets, who the hell said they were the definitive *anything* of DSL to begin with? So I truly believe there is money to be made as long as the company believes in long term growth as opposed to short term profits, which is one of the biggest problems that lead to most of the Venture Capital firms demise in funding. Everyone thought about making the fastest dollar, and shitty technologies messed things up for a lot of good business ideas, and companies.
Now for those customers using the services such as Covad, or any other that may have gone under or are going under, I saw a judge forced a company to pick up the slack, and what I would do is re-check some of those legally bonding contracts you signed when you purchased the service, and make sure these companies no matter what hold up to their end of the bargain or refund the difference.
Ghost in the Shell
360 degrees of Karma
I've heard various versions of that ranging from the Staq copyright notice being discovered in the MS binaries, to MS merely reverse-engineering Staq. (If Staq had a valid patent, even independently written code could have been a violation.) I don't know the truth and I'm not going to spend time trying to find out what it is...
The article left me wondering just what it is that the DSL companies were selling. They weren't selling services to the customer, ISP's did that. They can't run DSL lines to the customer -- only the local phone companies may do that, and quite often they can't (either don't know how, or the lines are too long or too patched-up). And finally, the local telcos are selling ADSL and T1 lines plus ISP service in competition with the DSL company & it's ISP's. So how in heck do you make a profit acting as a middleman when the company you depend on most to deliver the service you sell is also a competitor for the whole chain?
There is one ray of hope for the stockholders (not the customers or employees). It is probably possible in many cases to convince a court that the telco deliberately fouled up delivery of DSL in order to sell much higher priced T1's, or fouled up third-party DSL the better to sell DSL directly. So they should be able to sue under antitrust laws. This is in the tradition of Staq and CDC, which were rescued from bankruptcy by lawsuits after losing their markets.
For those who were born yesterday: Staq had a program which compressed data on the fly, so you could store twice as much on a small hard drive, if you didn't mind losing all those CPU cycles compressing and decompressing. This was briefly useful when Microsoft released Windows 3.x and made most existing drives too small, but MS-DOS 6.x included a program which looked suspiciously like Staq. Next year, much bigger hard drives were cheap and nobody cared about compression -- but Staq's lawsuit for patent or copyright infringement ground on and eventually won a big settlement. CDC built large mainframes in competition with IBM in the 60's. When they started, IBM didn't have anything near as powerful as the CDCs. So IBM announced the System 360, then tried to build it. The 360 hardware might have been on schedule, but the OS was several years late -- but still, many IBM customers waited for it instead of buying CDC. CDC filed an antitrust suit, claiming that selling vaporware was unfair competition. Long before the suit was settled, the full 360 line was out and delivering the promised power, and CDC was bankrupt. But finally IBM paid them to settle the suit -- and allegedly also to erase a database of IBM misdeeds that cost $16M to compile, before the Feds got interested...
When it comes to running servers/services, I called and asked, and after I explained what they were to the lady, she told me they had NO policy regarding anything like that, so go ahead. She may not have had any idea what she was talking about, but she did tell me it was OK.
And lucky me, I live in a poor-ass neighborhood, I'm convinced I'm one of about three people that can afford broadband here.
This sig may be reproduced by anyone for any reason.
I wonder if the disintegrating DSL market has anything to do with the fact that(at least in Seattle area) cable service is better, cheaper, and faster? I've been much happier w/ my cable(Millenium Digital Media) than any of my buddies w/ DSL. For that matter, can anyone help my clueless self with an idea why ppl would choose a DSL company(esp. one that has to go through another layer of ISP) over cable? Not trying to be inflammatory, if anyone cares, just curious.
This sig may be reproduced by anyone for any reason.
And with that they put their revenue risk into a few baskets instead of spreading it out.
Covad deserves what its getting. They picked the wrong strategy and now they are paying the price.
The notion that it was lack of capital on the investors side is just flat out wrong. That gear was purchased on Lease dollars and would have paid for itself if they could have collected.
Compare this with QWEST/USWEST who made it open to any ISP who bought and paid for a minimum DS1 circuit. No minimum number of circuits, just pay your bills and you can play.
In town, our largest ISP (Onvoy) cried "no money in DSL" when in fact they lost their Covad contract because they couldn't reach the minimum 10,000 circuits.
What a joke.
Goodbye Covad! I hope to buy out your CO's in Minneapolis soon
-Duck
Old age and treachery almost always overcome youth and skill.
Current stock market is very scared of anything to do with online technology. The pendulum swung into irrational exuberance back in 99', and now it's swung far the other way to the extreme. Wait till the market wisens up and the economy picks up. There's definitely a bright future in DSL. If they die, I'll start one hehe.
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Did you just fart? Or do you always smell like that?
eTrade SUCKS
So the financial markets give covad and rythms less than a 10% chance of surviving long enough to pay their corporate debt. With all due respect to the covad and rythms fans (*cough*stockholders*cough*) this article doesn't put forth a radical viewpoint... as far as the bond market is concerned, it's not if but when.
ILEC pricing must have had a lot to due with their untimely demise. While the immediate problem these company face is insufficient capital to continue operating and no access to additional capital through the bond markets, who knows what the situation would be if these companies could have charged the 2x-3x their current prices for the last few years.
I'm not sure what the situation was in other parts of the country, but here in the Bay Area the cheapest i could order DSL for before PacBell entered the market was somewhere north of $200. Then PacBell started offering 1500/128 for $50. Within months, northpoint and covad were offering consumer packages below $100. Now, I don't know a lot about the economics of offering copper wire DSL service, but I do know something about ISP service, and the $10 portion of the PacBell bill dedicated to ISP charges was obviously below their cost. It wouldn't surprise me if the copper portion was also below cost (now $30/mo)... perhaps if amortized over 20 years it looks OK.
In my eyes this kind of pricing was always designed to drive the competing DSL providers out of business. And it seems like it's worked just fine. It wouldn't be too surprising to see ILEC's raise their prices for DSL service after the others go out of business. They will (rightly) be able to cite difficulties making these price points profitable, and the PUC will likely roll out the red carpet for them... Can you imagine the uproar there would be in california if the PUC stood their ground and PacBell (as the last remaining dsl provider) threatened to turn off DSL service? Surely they'd have to go along with whatever price hikes were suggested.
It strikes me that the ILEC's may be able to benefit again by this behavior by doing like AT&T and buying equipment for a couple pennies on the dollar from their bankrupt competitors. After all, they'll need the equipment, they'll have a lot more business soon.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
...and so far everything is working gre^H^H^Hj4vgj4n#######
Lets face it, a CLEC providing DSL is not the best thing in the world. CLECs have to resell services they purchase from the ILEC, so the ILEC will always have the lowest cost. Having DSL through an ILEC (Verizon, Pacbell, etc), wouldn't be so bad, if they A. implimented a viable commercial DSL product (AFAIK the "commercial" Bell Atlantic DSL does not come with even *1* static IP, much less a block), and B. Stopped overselling bandwidth. Not to mention, all the other problems ILEC DSL have. If Verizon hired a reputable "consultant" to go over all of Verizon's DSL services (from provisioning to service, both technical and non technical aspects), made a list of what they need to improve, I think everyone would be happier. Well, at least until fiber to the home comes around.
What is needed is for the general public to be aware of the problems with Telco monopolies with DSL services. What should be done is to have a large outbreak of "striking" end users of Telephone and DSL services from the great Telcos. What I mean here is that have every end user of the services "not pay" for the services rendered in protest to release the grip that telcos have on the DSL market.
With this protest, we can show the Telcos that the PEOPLE have the power and not the otehr way around. If everyone does not pay the Telcos, then the telcos would have to listen to their demands and eventually comply with it.
However, to get the whole North American market to Yell this out to the general public would be like shouting your web address at a rock concert. You just would not be heard unless you got a MIC in your hand.
If the power of the people show the Telcos we want independant providers, then they would have to comply. Otherwise, Telcos would end up being in so much debt, they might have to fold and I doubt they want to do that.
*Headline News* censorship shuts down the Internet! More at 6PM!
The reason why DSL companies are failing is because of the hardware manufacturers. They are overcharging for the hardware out there. As an example, the cost of a typical DSLAM ranges for 48 ports @ $35,000 to the 672 port models @ $250,000 level. The cost is between $400 to $1000 per port. Then you need the ATM OC links to hook up the units, which can run $50,000-100,000 per month plus each interchange to the COs and then you got hundreds of millions of dollars of expenses with minimal profits. Fiber costs have significantly dropped but the Telcos have not reduced these pricings off their regulated prices. Router and Switching manufacturers are now hurting cause they charge way too much for their equipment. If they slashed the cost of their hardware in half, then possibly everyone would benefit from it and eventually be able to push forward to offer DSL services at reasonable pricing. Resell pricing of High speed @ $20-30/month is hurting everyone and eventually the end user when they lose their service. High Speed resell connections should be priced at about $60-100/month to relate more appropriately the annual costs of serving DSL. This would mean $90-140/month to the end user.
*Headline News* censorship shuts down the Internet! More at 6PM!