I was initally annoyed at myself for reading this whole thing, but then I realized, Hey, I'm at work!
Re:Per Transaction Fees Suck...
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If they normally buy things with money that they don't have
I take offense to you thinking that the only people who use credit cards are people that don't have the money to pay cash for their purchase. I enjoy sticking it back to the credit card companies by using them every chance I get, paying them off in full every month, and reaping boku rewards for the volume of purchases that I put through them.
Yet a DSL installation is not any more complicated than a standard phone installation!
Oh how wrong you are. DSL is a royal pain in the butt to install. The line has to be qualified, the pair has to be rewired to a DSLAM in the C.O., the data service needs to be provisioned, sometimes in multiple pieces of equipment, and then there are the mystery lines, that just don't work when all of the work is finished. Trust me on this. Dial tone is waaayy easier.
I live in a small town in upstate NY that is deploying TV and highspeed data over VDSL using equipment from Next Level Communications. I've been involved with this project from the beginning, and I must say, this technology is very cool. Currently, to my apartment, I've got the capability of 3 separate, simultaneous channels of video, and up to a 2.5 Mbps symetrical data connection. The article on CNN made it sound like there would be 60 seperate channels of video simultaneously, but I think that they meant that that is how many are available on the system total. The equipment that we use maxes out around 150 channels, but when the smoke clears on our project, I think that we'll have around 120. Each channel is MPEG-2 encoded at around 8 megs of bandwidth, but the picture quality is still quite impressive. The actual VDSL signal that arrives at the home is between 25 and 32 megs, if I recall correctly.
Some things that we've run into:
Regulatory Issues - NY Public Service Commission is a sloth about approving franchises
Cable plant quality - bridge taps and load coils wreak havoc on VDSL signal (surprise)
Multi-vendor projects can make it very difficult to point fingers during configuration troubles
Limited reach of VDSL signal - necessitates building out fiber plant for the "Fiber To The Neighborhood" concept. Not too big a deal in a metro area, but can be problematic in the rurals.
This project has had its headaches, but it has been great experience to work with so many high-end network devices. It rocks to work for a small company in a small town and have access to such cutting-edge technology!
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I was initally annoyed at myself for reading this whole thing, but then I realized, Hey, I'm at work!
I take offense to you thinking that the only people who use credit cards are people that don't have the money to pay cash for their purchase. I enjoy sticking it back to the credit card companies by using them every chance I get, paying them off in full every month, and reaping boku rewards for the volume of purchases that I put through them.
No. =)
lol, comon Mike, I thought I was the only one...
Do you really think Nortel will have anything left to release next year?
Oh how wrong you are. DSL is a royal pain in the butt to install. The line has to be qualified, the pair has to be rewired to a DSLAM in the C.O., the data service needs to be provisioned, sometimes in multiple pieces of equipment, and then there are the mystery lines, that just don't work when all of the work is finished. Trust me on this. Dial tone is waaayy easier.
I should clarify my intial sentence. It's not the "small town" that's deploying VDSL, it's the company I work for, Delhi Telephone Company.
Some things that we've run into:
This project has had its headaches, but it has been great experience to work with so many high-end network devices. It rocks to work for a small company in a small town and have access to such cutting-edge technology!