Does Internet Speed Vary by Season?

Mon Oct 12 14:04:05 UTC 2009

> On 2009-10-11, at 19:22 , Joe Greco wrote:
> > (*) In the late 1990's, I heard the most astonishing claims made by  
> > a new
> > entrant into the Milwaukee ISP market, about how some of the "other"  
> > ISP's
> > "shared" lines between customers and this decreased your speeds.   
> > They had
> > no clue who I was, so I engaged their technical person for a while  
> > who set
> > out to convince me that other ISP's really _did_ do this mythical  
> > line-
> > sharing - multiple modems to one port.  Until I started talking  
> > about the
> > technical aspects, that is.
> 
> Not so mythical. Around the same time period, we found out about an  
> ISP offering always-on ISDN BRI service for such a low price that it  
> could not possibly make sense. We wondered how they could make ends  
> meet at that rate until we found out how they did it. They daisy  
> chained multiple customers' BRI lines together, using the second B  
> channel from one customer to connect the next customer down the line.  
> Once, one of their customers switched to our service and we  
> reconfigured their router (a legitimate action: both router and BRI  
> line belonged to the customer). Who knows how many downstream  
> customers we broke by doing that.

A virtual ISDN party line!  Cool!  :-)

... JG
-- 
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
"We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I
won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN)
With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.