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Crashing And Burning In The DSL World
Aarthek writes: "As I was doing my usually daily browse I came across this story from PCWorld. After my experiences with PhoenixDSL being transfered to Telocity, and Telocity not delivering the service. I've been wondering how much longer companys like Rhythms can stay 'in the game.'" The article has a brief postmortem on DSL providers who have already dissolved and paints no rosy picture for the survivors. Low margins, high barriers -- sounds like another case of DSL Woes.
Oh, good God, no. Their phone people overbilled me $300 in two months. I've been trying for six months to get those charges dropped. Every month I get the bill (and overdue notices and threats that they'll shut off my long-distance service) and I call to complain. I am assured each time that "this time it's fixed." Wait 30 days, repeat.
I would rather use a 2400-baud modem than buy DSL from Verizon, given my experiences with their billing center thus far. If there were a CLEC in town from which I could buy phone service, I'd switch in a heartbeat.
Verizon is incompetent, unhelpful, and soulless. Even their telephone division.
I just submitted the article to the Slashdot queue:
m is a site for good (biased) information.
1) The bill is HR 1542
2) http://www.newnetworks.com/TauzinDingellisevil.ht
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
My local ISP, IgLou.com, has been battling BellSouth (our local Baby Bell) for several years over DSL access. It seems that the ISP (local to a few local major cities) is actually winning a few small battles.
http://www.iglou.com/dsl/victory/ is their press release concerning their victory in courth, requiring that BellSouth provide DSL access to local ISPs for the same amout that it changes its largest cutomser, Bellsouth.net.
I keep waiting for IgLou to offer DSL for reasonable rates.
Slashdotters across the country should be informed of , with its inclusion of a bill by y Representative Billy Tauzin (R-LA) allowing BabyBells to prevent local ISPs from accessing their DSL lines.
Perhaps I should have submitted this as a full story...
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
too bad that the weak providors (such as Verizon) are doing the best. They are probably doing better b/c they don't have to pay people to give good support and they oversell their bandwith to the point of being crazy.
I am very disappointed with Verizon as a DSL providor. Their normal telephone services are fine and their tech support is also fine.. When you get to the DSL operations they lack in many areas:
1. knowledge
2. telling the truth
3. customer first
4. calling back
5. caring that their service blows
I have used DSL under epix.net in PA and have never had a problem. They are very helpful (even w/Linux and in fact have some Linux gurus on staff that are willing to help).
When you call in for customer service I don't expect to wait on hold for 2 hours (until the portable phone dies), I don't expect to hear "yes, we know, there is nothing planned to fix that in the near future", I don't want to hear lies "oh, no technician would have told you that", and I don't want to hear excuses. I want the service that I am paying for.
It is a sad state of affairs that in a capitalist economy the best isn't winning...
So is cable really the only viable alternative? AS a telocity DSL subscriber, I've been pretty happy with my service. But it seems to me that Cable provides a superior infrastructure to copper wiring. Until fiber runs to my home, is cable the way to go? Does anyone out there love/loath their cable service. I'm reluctant to support the aol/timwarner behemoth, but it looks like other isp's are getting into the game (earthlink will soon be providing service to all timewarner customers).
My other computer is your Windows box
How, exactly, is it the fault of the Baby Bells and congress that these companies built their network out too thin to be profitable?
Is it the baby bells putting a hex on these companies that makes a business model of building out twenty hardly-used COs for every profitable one not a good plan?
It's all well and good to asy that big business is squashing the little guy. In many cases it's true. However, the "little guy" can also self-destruct based on its own idiocy.
Another damned comic
+++ NO CARRIER
His beef is with DSL providers that he says care more about their bottom line than they do about customers.
Y'know, if these companies were actually paying attention to the bottom line, they might not have built out their network too wide and thin to possibly be profitable, and wouldn't be having these problems now. If anything, they weren't paying *enough* attention to the bottom line before it bit them.
As for blaming the baby bells and such, they didn't make northpoint, covad and rhythms deploy stupidly. It's not the fault of the baby bells that their numbers didn't add up. Northpoint in particular was not only poorly planned, but wildly incompetent during their best days. While the major telcos might have concievably hastened its demise, they didn't make northpoint STUPID, northpoint did that on its own. I don't blame Verizon for not wanting to buy them out after taking a look at them.
The blame also would have to go on the shoulders of bone-headed investors. Laying out a wide-scale network like this would never be profitable in anything under six years at best. After it's all built out and the market rises to fill it, then yes it could concievably be profitable, but not before then. Anyone investing in such a venture should have bothered to make themselves aware of this.
Personally, I've got some lovely DSL which is currently doing fine, and not going anywhere. I get it from a local facilities-based ISP that only builds out COs if they believe the COs to be profitable. So while it's not as wide as the coverage offered by northpoint, rhythms, covad and the like, it's at least a sane business model for stability.
Another damned comic
+++ NO CARRIER
In many European countries, though the telephone networks where built when the telco's were government owned _AND_ subsidized. Henze, the public paid for the network, not the company that happened to be the result of privatization.
... hmm, wait... ... hmm, wait... ... first a lawsuit, then - we promise - we will innovate... ... ...
;-(
I don't think the last mile is 100% of the difficulty with DSL. The sheer volume of traffic on the backbones as a result of people being connected at megabit speeds gives a whole slew of new problems. Suddenly the best router you can buy simply can't handle the traffic anymore... what to do now?... It simply takes time to design a large high volume TCP/IP network.
I do wonder why it is then, that we don't see more multicasting of multimedia content. Multicasting saves a huge bundle on the backbones and keeps broadband users happy. Lack of innovation from the content providers? Broadband users are not waiting for more flash plugins or flickering ads on web pages, they want the real multimedia Internet experience that was promised in promotions of the 'information superhighway'. Why isn't there a big race going on between radio stations to open shop on the Internet with streaming MP3? And how about the same for TV stations (at 640kbit and up, video often looks pretty ok) Sure, there is some streaming going on, but it does not yet seem like a revolutionary thing for what we currently know as radio and TV...
The future is...
sigh.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
I work as a sysadmin for a small isp in SoCal and one thing that's makes it really hard for us to get by is some of the ways in which GTE/Verizon and PacBell try and squeeze out the little guys.
For example, Verizon is dictated by law that they must charge $32.50 for the DSL line (not including ISP service). That was fine when they charged a total of $49.50 for a complete package. But in order to remove competitors, they have lowered their prices to $39.99, causing their ISP division to take a loss presumably, while they pay for it with profits from the telephone division. This makes quite hard for ISPs using Verizon to supply the physical link to make it on such a small margin.
PacBell used these tactics as well and has virtually eliminated all the competition in their areas. They set their price at $39.95 and once they had most of the market, they raised it back to $49.95. This only works when they have large cash reserves or can abuse their relationship with the telco to fund price cutting with the DSL line profits
Traditionally, Verizon offered free modems to all customers who signed up for a 1 year contract with any ISP. They've since stopped that offer as well and made it so that only their customers get the modem, while ours must pay $200. Gee, which company will the customers sign up with.
This sort of crap makes it really hard to make a profit or even stay in business. We've managed to stay alive, but a lot of other ISPs in our area have gone under. From what I've heard Verizon doesn't have particularly good service, they just win through anti-competive behavior and ISPs can't afford to sue and don't have the market share to make them compromise. Definitely bad for the consumer and us as well. Hopefully, Verizon will decide they have enough of the market and raise their prices back, allowing us to make a bit more money.
Unlike the woes i have heard from many other dsl users, @link actually had an incredible amount of reliability (one 15 minute outage in 2 years!) and great tech support. It is sad to see even the good providers crash and burn before they can get off the ground.
As the topic says, the DSL era is over. Its an illfated technology that isn't going to last. Primary reason for this is because of the big Bells, like Verizon, who want to control the DSL market.
The only companies that are going to survive are the ones who not only do DSL, but also Ts, dialups, webhosting, etc (ie: have some other source of profit).
Now cable, thats a totally different story. I thought Cable would be the one to go under, but its a superior technology and seems to scale very well to a large amount of customers. Why spend 100+ a month to get 1mbit when you can get 3+ mbit for 40 bucks a month?
Though I can only see cable working really well in a consumer environment. DSL is better suited for businesses and offers more functionality (everything a T1 offers but with reduced stability).
But then again, look how many providers are going under today in general. Maybe T1s aren't so safe anymore.
Brielle
> Does the word "duh" mean anything to you? Welcome to capitalism, Mr. Nathans. It seems the only thing one can do is to do the same old capitalistic thing: vote with your dollars. The ILEC-DSL companies are fooling everyone into catering to the lowest common denominator but those who buy into the bargain-hunter trap are going to get bargain-quality. Not only that, but they're also taking away market-share from the independent providers. Certainly the financial profile of the readers here is such that they could pay higher prices for the same bandwidth, so instead of railing against the system we all could pay what we already know the value of these services is. The suspicion (with some evidence, natch) is that the prices will go up anyway once the competition is eliminated, so putting yourself ahead of the game by paying those prices to an independent provider can help their margins and stave off the big guys. Will it work? I don't know, but just going straight to the big guys so you can pay as little as possible is going to get you what you're paying for: as little as possible.
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
Basically, it's not that every one of these DLECs and CLECs were dumb, but they didn't see see the dot com downturn. It's natural for there to be some weeding out of the sick and the lame in this type of venture. However, investors are scared off from these ventures at the moment. For various reasons, some good, some bad. Given a couple more years of a good stock market two or three DSL provides would have emerged.
The plus side of all of this is it hits MSN right were it hurts. Those who have seen MSNs latest deal with QWEST for residential DSL can see they are scambling for a good broad band solution. And with QWEST they only get 14 solid states.
The down side is it gives AOL a natural advantage being relating to Time Warner. Really I don't want to see either company do well because my opinion is they both just plain suck.
Now, in defense of Northpoints, Covads, etc, they burned huge ammounts of money up by co-locating in the ILEC's CO. I've worked for an ILEC, let me tell you, the ILEC screws up all the time. It's nothing devious, it's not like they are trying to screw NorthPoint or Covad. There are just too many issues: training, facilities, moral, etc, that play into things not getting to test and turn up when the CLEC asked for it.
And basically, because the CLEC is the one talking to the customer, they are the ones having to pay $$$ for customer satisfaction.
So, shame on the ILEC for being a dumb ass, but shame on the CLEC for not managing expantion better.
All sarcasm aside, there are some people laughing all the way to the bank here: the Baby Bells, the "last-mile" providers. In Portland it's QWest, and they don't exactly make it easy for little ISPs to sign up DSL customers. Especially since they have their own competing service, and a guaranteed revenue stream from existing customers to prop up any DSL losses.
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
This is just an extension of the idiocy seen in the dot-com 'new economy' spread to consumer services. They didn't know how to run a business, and didn't give a thought to figuring out how fast they could become profitable. Anyhow, their folly will be a boon to the companies that buy their equipment at dirt cheap prices (like AT&T), because you'll have blue chip companies that can not only take a loss, but know how to turn a profit, providing DSL service. Don't discount DSL just yet. Just think of these failed companies as the telecom version of pets.com.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
ATT and it's siblings spent decades and billions of $$$ building their networks. Along comes DSL and some new start up's and now the Baby Bells are supposed to give up their networks to new competitors whose long term aim is to put them out of business. Does anybody here want to spend a few decades building a software or consulting business only to have to open it up to a new competitor? Besides, I think the current crop of DSL companies are doomed to failure. Their business plan pretty much revolves around whining and crying until the Baby Bells do what they say. I think the future competitors are the few telco's who have spent billions laying their own lines and are growing at a decent rate every year. The current crop thought they could get rich because they had a right to use the Baby Bells' lines and somehow most of those who could switch to DSL would. Kind of like the .com's.
...thats what most of them are charging because they can't make money off it. I'm serious! I know a guy who works for a regional up-and-coming ilec. He told me that they don't sell dsl service alone, you have to also 'subscribe' to their highly competitive long distance service which happens to be the voip service which is on the same fddi ring as their as their internet service. I didn't even realize how easily they can be packaged together until he told me that. As a service it's bareable but in a package could sweeten a deal.
BOSTON SUCKS!
I'm on Cox@Home, and while their customer service has a tendancy towards suckage, and we get a few hour outage every 4 months or so due to "hub upgrades", it's reliable and fast the rest of the time. I've looked into DSL, but there's really few reasons to switch at this point, seeing as we can be at least relatively sure of the cable service always being there. DSL may be faster during peak times or in neighborhoods where there's a large amount of cable users, but it's not as solid from a business standpoint.
Maybe if a few big companies (Like a Baby Bell?) were providing access, people'd be more inclined towards it.
-- Chris
-- Chris
$email=~s/[^a-zA-Z0-9@.]//g;
...just go to college, live in the dorm, and you don't have to worry about it anymore! I get ethernet, cable, telephone, utilities, maid, Lake Washington, the Cascades, Mt. Rainier, and *food* for less than you cheeses pay to live in a box for a month.
I'm planning on staying in college for a while... there are a bunch of professional degrees, right? Collect 'em all!
The future of DSL providers for end-users is going the same way as the Bell's... (obviously)
Any of these small DSL providers are getting their backbones from the Big companies that either
a) Supply the large DSL companies as well
b) Will offer their own DSL service in the future
So essentially once all of these companies reach a point where their debt load (Covad = $1.3billion in debt) is too much to deal with and will sell to a larger company... It's the same pattern over and over again... Eventually it will be to the point where the bells are currently at... Government forced deregulation, which in the end never works out in the way that it was supposed to and the big bell's will simply repurchase all of the little spawned companies and the cycle begins again....
--- My Karma is bigger than your...
------ This sentence no verb
Probably one of the biggest issues with DSL is that these companies can't establish their *own* networks. Instead, they have to rely on the bigger telcos to provide the connectivity, and of course that brings all kinds of charges plus the traditional waiting game.
At least that's the issue in Canada right now. There's a few DSL providers out there, but really Sympatico is just about the only viable one. Why? Because Bell Canada owns the network, and they own Sympatico. Other providers have to pay Bell fees to use the phone lines, to get everything set up, and finally they have to wait because Bell is the only company that can service the line if something goes wrong.
Looks like the cards are stacked. Margins are low because they have to compete with Sympatico, who uses the network already in place. Installation can take months because Bell puts priority on their customers over another provider's.
Personally, I'm using Cable (via Rogers@Home, though my usership was recently purchased from Shaw through a geographic trade in service areas). Even a bigger monopoly in this case - there is only one choice.
The third option, Look (I think they operate by Microwave or something, it's wireless) unfortunately isn't accepting any new customers until they sort their financial problems out.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
"For all I care Texas should secede already and make their own country."
IIRC, they tried that twice already. The first time was from Mexico in the 1840's (they succeeded), and the second was from the US in the 1860's (they failed).
"I imagine it will be an ARIAN nation of sorts"
That would be interesting to see, considering the way their former governor has a latina for a wife.
"and maybe we could even get rid of the asshole Bush that way too, as a bonus."
Oh, come now. It's also been the home of great Democrat presidents as well, like Johnson.
DSL is a pain in the ass sometimes. It's a *real* pain in the ass when you live 4000 Ft too far from the home office to get it, and you have to pay twice as much for less than half the bandwidth by getting ISDN. Grrrrrr.
But back in January I moved and woohoo I got very close to the home office. Verizon is now providing me with cheap and very reliable 768/128K DSL. It was installed on time and everything has been peachy.
But, now I'm moving again. Just a few blocks. So I'm having my account moved to a different address and phone #, same modem, same ISP, etc. Simple. This time, however, I've been screwed. I got an original due-date for activation on 04/26. 04/27 rolled around and I called to verify the activation had been done. Turns out the 04/26 date was bogus, and they claim to have no way to find out who did the order. Now the due date is 05/15. The shutdown date for this (old) location is 05/01. That's a 10 *working* day down-time, and they claim that's the best they can do!! Ever!!!
So, until 05/15, I need to use a POTS modem. *sigh* So I call to have a second analog line installed. Guess what... Due date is 05/03. Huh? DSL doesn't require a tech to come to my house, the analog line does. Why the hell does it take so long to activate the DSL line?
I love the bang-for-the-buck factor of DSL, but why the hell does practically every other aspect of it have to blow chunks? It seems that the phone companies don't *really* want to provide it, because it's so cheap. So why the hell don't they just charge a little more and provide decent service?? I'd gladly pay a bit more for it, if I could avoid all the problems. That would also provide a bit more cash for R&D, so maybe they could finally extend the truely pathetic distance restrictions.
Yep... DSL is great, until you find out your one of the majority who can't get it, or get screwed by phone company incompetence, or both.
--
Damn it Jim, that's my sphincter, not a jelly donut!!!