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FCC May Force Telcos to Cut Rates for DSL Providers
Sorklin writes "ZDNet has a story about a ruling in the FCC that might change the pricing structure of DSL. They write: 'Many in the industry expect the FCC will rule Thursday that such rentals are no longer necessary and that the DSL providers and RBOCs can share a single line into the
customer premises. If the Nov. 18 ruling goes their way, DSL providers will see about $20 dropped from their cost of delivering access.'"
I hate to correct something that's already been moderated to a 3, but it's between 2Mb/s and 512kb/s download and 256kb/s upstream. The rest was correct.
BT are rolling out to 400 substations by March 2000 (that's not a lot of areas - major towns/cities only). Also it appears that BT won't be an ISP for DSL initially - they're telling people to wait until other ISP's release pricing plans.
See BT's ADSL site for up to date details.
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
I was looking at DSL eariler this month and found that it rarely goes down in the area where I live. There is a $200 installation fee ad $99 activation fee and $50 a month + your phone bill. They are having a christmas (I find this upsetting because I'm jewish, not becuase they are aiming for the christian holidays but because I wanted DSL for chanukah) special which waives the install fee. $50 a month is too expensive when compared to cable which is much faster. Also I just got a new digital cable box which TimeWarner is boasting 27mb/s when the infastructure is in place.
Not to be nitpicky (well, okay, to be nitpicky) but isn't the title of this story a little inaccurate?
As far as I can tell, the ruling doesn't force anyone to change the pricing on anything. What it does is force the phone companies to allow competing DSL providers to use the same loop as the phone company uses for voice.
In other words: Previously, if I were to call up Covad (A competing DSL provider here in Seattle) they would have to use a seperate pair of wires to get DSL into my apartment. There is to technological barrier preventing them from using the same wires as my voice line. In fact, I get DSL service from US West, and they use my voice lines to carry DSL to my aparment. US West can charge less for DSL service, because they do not need to use an additional pair of wires for DSL. Covad would have to rent a whole seperate pair of wires in order to supply me with DSL, hence, the $20.
--GnrcMan--
The original plan was to be between 512K and 2M, but they've shelved plans for anything higher than 512K for the moment. It'll arrive eventually, but I wouldn't like to say when. BT's bulk pricing to ISPs will start at £40/month. The ISP will then add their own markup on that to get to an end-user price. As for BT's ADSL site giving up to date details, I wish it would. Sadly, though, it hasn't been unpdated for over 3 months.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
How are you bursting my bubble? They do it, my provider doesn't. My provider does offer proxies but they don't force its use, mostly because the amount of users often makes the proxies a heck of a lot slower (even though they have 9 proxies for my area) as well as a centralized possible point of failure.
:).
As far as utilization goes, this has to do with how the provider manages the network. My provider resegments the network as the amount of users grows, preventing terrible transfer rates. Of course utilization makes for variable traffic, but that's just as true on major internet backbones. Just look at sprint. They oversell their bandwidth many times. They often let it come to a point where they are overutilized. It's just a matter of proper management. The same can occur on sympatico.
Rogers IP's are more or less static. I have friends who have had the same IP for 3 years. The only thing that changed for them is the PTR (reverse DNS record). Mine on shaw, on the other hand is dynamic based on DHCP. We have 3 day leases though. I've had the same IP for 1.5 years. I wouldn't mind it changing every couple of years.
As far as the routing of rogers@home goes:
yep, that's true. Rogers was stupid and bought into a nationwide network with a limited number of backbone interconnections with other providers. What doesn't go through a major NAP or MAE ends up going halfway across the country. Shaw on the other hand buys local bandwidth from teleglobe, uunet, sprint -- and they have an @home connection for regional data center and modem to modem communications. It's still managed by @home though (or so I'm told by calgary and richmond hill noc monkeys). Blame rogers
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Just curious if this decision (if it does go the way for consumers) might decrease most phone companies incentive to roll out DSL? We've seen similar threats from the Cable carriers when talking about sharing the cable line. Would this decision slow down the already snail paced rollout?
I'm naturally for cheaper pricing schemes. In NYC (where I reside), the cheapest DSL you can get is from Bell Atlantic themselves. Any other carrier, the prices increase by about $20-30 for equivalent service. I'd love to use one of these alternatives, cause I don't much like BA, but with that kind of price differential (and a two year contract -- or the price increases again), I just can't see myself doing it.
What do you think?
It's been several years since I checked up on T1 and Frame Relay prices. It was hard to get an exact number since Bell Atlantic apparently couldn't find anyone able to discuss the prices with a non-business client.
Eventually I was able to get pointers to pricing info from one of the comp.dcom.telecom.* newsgroups/lists. DSL seems to be MUCH cheaper than the prices that the RBOCs are charging their business customers at present.
So what happens when they make DSL available for hundreds of dollars less per month? Wouldn't they be cannibalizing a big portion of their data services business (income-wise at least.) How much does this factor into how long it will take them to roll out DSL or other consumer data services? Can the RBOCs insist that their business customers continue paying a couple of hundred dollars per month for a fractional T1 when an equivalent DSL technology is available to consumers for $50/month?
numb
This is a Good Sign.
In September, the FCC ruled that competitive exchange carriers must be provided access to subloops.
English translation: all of us unfortunate souls who live over 9k feet from a central office a) soon will qualify for DSL service and b) will have a choice of DSL providers.
With the removal of rental fees the value proposition of providing DSL improves, increasing competition. Hopefully this will get the incumbent and competitive carriers off their butts and providing DSL to anyone who wants it (i.e. ME).
Imagine a world without websites where you enter your phone number and wait two weeks to be turned down for service. Do we dare to dream that by then they'll have worked out the bugs in provisioning?
Maybe the next century won't be so bad after all...
The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
Everyone else in my city has the potential to save 20$ on their DSL bills, I'm so happy for them. I still can't get DSL though. For some reason my telco (Pacific Bell) has decided that my area of town doesn't need DSL access so I'm stuck with a one way cable modem (I have to use my modem for upstream) that has lately become damn near impossible to connect to at night. Earthlink provides the net access for the cable, letting the cable co use their dialup centers. This is fine in the middle of the day but when I get home from class tonight the lines will be jam packed and I won't be able to log on. This happened about four years ago when Earthlink started to get real popular, they would meet their connection limit real quick and give everyone else busy signals. If I could get a damned DSL line I wouldn't have to deal with this crap. I can only hope this ruling makes PacBell decide it's cost effective to give this side of town DSL.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Even the most esteemed document ever written by a political leader, the Great Charter, was 99.9% regulation of private industry, and only 0.1% about human rights & civil rights.
The American system, for all it's much-vaunted independence from England, based it's Constitution on a simplified version of the Great Charter, because it works!
Government regulation works. It's necessary. Would you care to pay for each road you use, as you use it? Imagine all the toll booths you'd need. Imagine the delays that would cause. No longer being able to drive smoothly, but stopping every few miles to pay yet another person for road maintenance. It's not far-fetched. This is exactly the state of affairs that Europe faced, when Macadam and Telford roads were first intoduced.
Decentralising is good, when appropriate, but it is more expensive (more managers) and less efficient (zero co-ordination) when it is not appropriate. Rather than spouting nationalist dogma and arrogant pride, =THINK= about things.
You don't use a hammer to install a hard drive. You don't use a screwdriver to nail a plank in a deck. Why should politics be any different? The right tool for the right job, and arrogance be damned.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
..are two major reasons why I'd like to live in the USA [Gun Control and the US desire to sue for everything being two major reasons why I don't :-P]
:-(.
Here in England BT are *finally* going to grace us with 256K [or is it 512K?] DSL connections by March if you are fortunate enough to live in one of the 10 selected start locations; its going to cost around $80/month+ though.
The village where I live will probably get cable/DSL sometime in the fourth millenium
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Personally, I think it would be a good thing for the backbone providers to be forced to get off their duff and upgrade their services.
By now, backbones -SHOULD- be supporting very high-speed access (in excess of 0.5 terabytes), QoS (incl. ECN, CBQ and RED), native multicasting and multiple-path routing, in the event of network failures.
They aren't. There is no excuse for this. On the other hand, severe overloading through widespread DSL may force them to upgrade their pipes and their systems to avoid total collapse. (Which would cost them more money than they'd have to spend on such upgrades.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
What was supposed to happen is that other companies would be licensing the ability to set up shop and keep their equipment at the local telco office. I don't know if there just isn't any interest or bell hasn't upgraded the network. It seems they haven't been rolling out much in the past year.
:). Take a look at my transfer stats if you don't believe me. I haven't been able to find any other provider in the US and canada who offers internet at this speed at such a cheap price. The closest I've seen is some @home cities in the US for 40 USD a month -- but they get to go through the amazingly fast @home backbone connections to other providers(yes I'm being sarcastic). There was this one guy in connecticut on @home that I downloaded off of at 290k/s though..
I was waiting for it before, but now that I've heard that it uses a nortel 1 meg modem with a dynamic ip and they even force you to use a proxy for web access; no thanks. I'd rather pay my 39.90 CDN a month for shaw cable. The 3-5.5mbps variable downlink and 320-768kbps variable uplink all of the sudden seem pretty good
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That'd be sweet -- then I'd be getting 640kbps for only $33/month! Nice.
:)
And we all know that 640 should be enough for anybody!
I just got off the phone with a local ISP to order DSL service and a GTE line (disclaimer: I work for GTE, though for a separate business unit that handles internal IT). I live in the Dallas, TX area.
:) as well as $55/month for the GTE line charge. IOW, a little over $100/month for the privilege of being able to run (non-commercial) servers. @Home, my current provider, will give me up to 3 IP's, not necessarily in the same subnet, for a total cost of around $60/month, and a faster downstream but a 128k upload cap. Yes, I'm quite familiar with RFC 1918/NAT, but IPSec is a pain to configure over NAT, and since I don't admin one end, it's impossible.
I'm paying $47.95/month for 384k and a 8-IP subnet (5 usable, since 1 is taken up by the DSL bridge, which I refuse to call a modem
The thing is, while I'm quite willing to pay the price for what I want (extra IP's, a subnet, TOS that permit servers), I'm not sure someone else would be. Typical home users would pay up to $40-50/month, and while there are offerings that allow this, they're not common enough. Then again, GTE can't install fast enough to meet demand right now, but we'll see how long this lasts. Even a portion of this $20 "discount" would go a long way for a lot of folks to feel that DSL is within their acceptable price range.
"You can never have too many elephants on your team."
You'd be out of luck then. BT dropped it to 512Kb downstream last month (and hiked the price up at the same time!). Mass roll out will only be at 512K, although 2Mb should follow at a later date.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown