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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.
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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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
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.
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...