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Qwest To Offer 'Naked DSL'
hussar writes "Qwest is expected to announce today its plan to delink telephone service from its DSL offering. Given some comments I have seen in /. discussions of broadband issues, the plan, nicknamed 'naked DSL,' should be a welcome change." Update: 02/25 13:55 GMT by T :
cpfeifer points to the
Wall Street Journal's coverage.
Expect about fifty redundant comments about how great this will be if all you want is VoIP.
I thought this kind of option was standard everywhere, but I guess I was wrong. 'Force-Bundling' normal voice connection with DSL is quite ridiculous in my opinion.
...why this has taken so long?
What exec needed to be hit over the head with a pie chart to understand that DSL often just isn't competitive with cable because of the need for a landline?
(also, i doubt that $14.99 a month for a landline includes taxes)
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
If you don't already know, then you should probably be looking at hosting your website with an actual web hosting provider. I don't know about the situation in the US, but in Canada most of the ISPs have provisions in their contracts forbidding you from running websites on a residential/consumer connection. Of course lots of people still do, but those with websites that get any significant amount of traffic are usually targetted.
that's right: keep the broadband and forget the landline... it's much cheaper to have a cell phone.
Efren Belizario
headspeak.com
To making VoIP the broadband killer app. Basically, being able to have a broadband connection without needing a phone line lowers the price of using VoIP to the extent that you can make a noticeable saving (assuming you can contact thsoe you need to via some VoIP service). This will possibly see applications like Skype taking off that little bit quicker.
It definitely is about time. I wish Qwest was available in the Houston area -- I would switch over to their service in a heartbeat. I currently have to pay SBC $15 a month for a voice line that I have absolutely no use for, just so I can get DSL. And I don't get DSL from SBC either (I hate PPPoE), I get it from a local company called Oplink.net. Vonage provides me with my primary phone service at $24.99 a month. My combined phone and DSL bills are still like $20 less than what it used to be with SBC, but why should I be throwing away $15 for no reason every month for a service I don't need?
:(
Then they call me every other week asking me why I switched over from them to Vonage. It is really annoying.
Here's to hoping SBC eventually follows suit. You Qwest customers are lucky.
Am I a hipster-doofus?
Then look into co-location hosting. Your home ISP provider is never going to give you the kind of upstream you can get from a real hosting service. If you provide your own server and do the upkeep yourself, it's actually pretty cheap at some places.
How come the US is so far behind?
Because the phone companies are greedy, and rich enough to be able to sway the people who regulate them.
They can thus prevent sensible options like allowing customers to just order a "dry pair" connection and can tie phone service to the physical connection to the switching office.
If the choice is between technical advancement or something else that will better serve their customer, or profit, U.S. companies will pick profit every time-- even if capital outlay to improve their offerings would generate much more long-term profit. U.S. companies don't look past the next quarter.
I'm sure all geeks are getting pissed off at the increasing port blocking imposed by ISPs (IMHO they're not really providing 'Internet' service if they're filtering your packets at the TCP level). I want a service that provides me with real IP connectivity. This means I can send and receive any packets I want -- why not throw this in with the 'Naked' service and advertise it as real Internet
dhcp? dns? free webspace??? All I want out of a provider are two wires and four numbers which stay the same. Well ok, a couple sets of numbers but I could make due with one set.
I'm a little surprised more people aren't hopping on here to howl with delight. Maybe they're off disconnecting their phone lines and signing up for Qwest DSL though.
Comcast doesn't let you host a site or server of any kind on any Residential connection. That said, they'll never bother you, judging from those I know who have Comcast (myself included), unless you suck a lot of bandwidth - then, they'll start poking. If what's your hosting is important to you, this could really hurt whatever business you're maintaining online.
The sad thing is I wanted to upgrade my connection to Business so that I could legitimately host a website or 2 from home, and the only upgrade Comcast cable internet offers is a very small upload bandwidth upgrade - still too hopelessly small to host a legitimate site - for more than double the price.
So, DSL will offer you higher upload rates. If the site(s) you want to host aren't crucial, Residential DSL or Cable won't matter much as you're probably using little upload for the site(s). If they are crucial, I'd recommend a high-end Business DSL connection, both for the site's speed, and so you can sleep at night knowing your site's not being taken down and replaced by a breach of TOS page.When i worked for a large ISP in MN, we were providing DSL from Qworst and Northpoint. The biggest battle back then was that you could NOT get a line without voice services for DSL. Who pushed that? QWEST. Now they're going to do it? Go figure. On the upside, if they wanted, they could use the entire copper spectrum for the DSL instead of everything below 25khz, thus opening up the floodgates, as it were. But i think that's the part they don't want you to know... (Think northpoint, who just rented copper from the CLEC/ILEC and ran a virtual T1 over the pair) The other big players were wholly against this as well, since it'd cut into the cashflow... Then again, this was in the era of one-way cable modems, and DSL was the best bang for the buck... Just a thought...
The problem is people who know what they want (e.g. You) are a very, tiny, miniscule part of the population that's listed in the "Other" category on the exec's pie charts. When an ISP is offering a service labeled "residential", they're envisoning thousands of unpatched Windows boxes with stock IIS 5.0 and wide-open SMB ports. They _have_ to block ports to protect clueless users from themselves, as well as protect their own infrastructure from the next Code Red/Slammer/SoBig/etc.
The service that you want (not tied to a landline, no port restrictions, etc.) is widely available, but you'll be paying for it. Most ISDN for example will give you 128Kbit, no port restrictions, no land line required, etc., but you'll be paying $150/month for it.
Yes, it sucks that many DSL providers will drop an incoming TCP SYN packet before it ever reaches your home server, but they've got to pick their priorities and "unlimited TCP" got thrown out.
Actually, an old boss of mine ran the numbers on this once, for a local cel phone provider. He's a business/financial kind of guy, so I didn't understand his whole methodology, but it went something like taking the market capitalization of the telco, subtracting out the net liabilities and all of the value in fixed assets (repeater towers, phone lines, etc. as well as things like office furniture). The left over is the total "value" of all subscriptions, as determined by the market. Just divide by the number of subscribers and that's the value (to the stock market) of each subscriber for that telco.
In this case, Microcell Communications (Fido) in Toronto, it came to something like $800 per subscriber.
- In Capitalist America, law violates YOU!
I've played this game for our office for years.
My best advice is to carefully look at any very small phone companies that might be in your area. We eventually got a deal on a fractional T1 (1 Mb) + 2 phone lines for $300/month. The phone company in question was bought out two months later, but our deal is still good, and will be for years.
THAT would be cheap enough to share with neighbors. It seems to be really stable, really reliable, and (for us) really cheap.
Every DSL company we dealt with before had major issues (including going out of business), major downtime, and major delays during install.
More than once we had the entire office running on a single shared dial up after someone remote screwed us up. I still keep that modem handy.
plus-good, double-plus-good
You do know that both the CMUX and modem (should) auto-train their line levels, etc, don't you?
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?