Symmetry, DSL, and all that

Mon Mar 2 19:21:52 UTC 2015

The most important point is yes, that no one cares. If people wanted it, it would be sold to them. End. of. story. 

----- 
Mike Hammett 
Intelligent Computing Solutions 
http://www.ics-il.com 

----- Original Message -----

From: "Steve Naslund" <SNaslund at medline.com> 
To: "Mike Hammett" <nanog at ics-il.net>, "NANOG list" <nanog at nanog.org> 
Sent: Monday, March 2, 2015 1:19:29 PM 
Subject: RE: Symmetry, DSL, and all that 

>The backend is still symmetric. It's still something like 1.25 gigs up and 2.5 gigs down. You can only beat that going to AE. 
> 
> 

Truth is, once the user is achieving what they consider to be acceptable performance they don't care if it is symmetric or not. 

> 
> 
>Not a very informative discussion. 
> 
>Points of fact... 
> 
>From Verizon's January filings regarding 2014Q4: 
> 
>1. Verizon has about eight million FIOS customers. 
>2. "Fifty-nine percent of FiOS consumer Internet customers subscribed to data speeds of at least 50Mbps, up from 46 percent one year earlier." 
> 

Eight million FIOS customers does not even come close to representing the bulk of users out there. In fact, it does not even represent the majority of "high speed" customers out there. 

>From a Verizon press release last summer, all FIOS speeds are now symmetric. 

And no one cares. I don't even see Verizon commercials crowing about how great it is to have symmetry. If customers loved it that much don't you think they would market that way? 

> 
>http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/07/verizon-fios-finally-symmetrical-upload-speeds-boosted-to-match-download/ 
> 
>ADSL development proceeded the development of the consumer Internet. The original patent was filed in 1988. DSL was designed originally to deliver video in an ISDN/ATM world. For that reason, it was asymmetric. 

ADSL did not proceed the development of the consumer Internet in the commercial world. If it did, we would never have gone with dial-up modems. Patent dates have very little to do with commercial availability at all. Please give me an example of a purchasable service using ADSL prior to its use in Internet delivery. The number one reason ADSL succeeded and SDSL did not.....you could put an ADSL signal on the phone line you already had in your house, SDSL required a new loop to be ordered. Faster to provision and it can be done without a truck roll. 

Steven Naslund 
Chicago IL 