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SBC Wants To Switch DSL Format To PPPoE
Mr. Haplo writes: "Looks like SBC's at it again. According to this story, SBC wants to change everyone's DSL connection to PPPoE. The article goes on to say that the California Public Utilities Commission and the ISP Association are filing complaints against SBC and PacBell over this. It doesn't mention anything about SDSL connections, however, so I don't know what they'll do, if anything, about them. They do say that business services would be left alone, though, so I assume this means just about any SDSL services (I hope!). Someone needs to take a baseball bat to SBC's executives."
From Verizon.
And it doesn't suck.
Millions of /.'ers gasp in astonishment.
I mean, I use a Linksys router that has the PPPoE firmware installed. This means that i have a static IP anyway as the router uses a Keepalive and is never turned off. This is almost no different from DHCP. If your machine is not connected when the address is renewed, you don't get that IP address. Period.
Static IP's I can understand, but the people who really need them can pay for them. *GASP!* Heresy!
Yes, low-cost high bandwidth is what we want, but not necessarily what we will get. Yet. As I'm fond of saying, Joe Q. User who buys Compaqs at Best Buy with WinME installed will think nothing of a PPPoE connection. And that's if he even goes beyond his 53.3K POTS connection.
This is nothing compared to what they've done before. I used to work for a regional ISP that resold SWB's DSL. They gave us access to their prequalification tools, which we used to assess availability of services when someone enquired
It would give results as green, orange or red. Most often it came up red.
We didn't think anything of this until we started getting phone calls. It turned out almost everyone who came up red would get a postcard from SWB within two weeks telling them about this wonderful new DSL service that had just become available in their area.
We refused to sell SWB DSL after that point on principle.