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FCC May Force Telcos to Cut Rates for DSL Providers

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the leveling-playing-fields dept.

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.'"

3 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. DSL & Cable modems... by maroberts · · Score: 3

    ..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

    1. Re:DSL & Cable modems... by Tet · · Score: 3
      BT are *finally* going to grace us with 256K [or is it 512K?] DSL connections by March

      It's 512K download, 256K upload. And it'll be March at the absolute earliest, with £50/month (about US$80) being the minimum, too. It wouldn't surprise me to see the final figure for end user consumers being around £75/month. Sigh. Fortunately, I should be in one of the early adopter areas, but as fair as I'm aware, they haven't even published finalised details of that yet.

      --
      "The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
  2. Hope so... by El+Volio · · Score: 3

    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.

    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 :) 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.

    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."