[nanog] Re: Microsoft offering xDSL access

John R. Levine johnl at iecc.com
Sat Jan 24 16:09:49 UTC 1998


>The only thing I can figure is that the morons in question are going to
>quote, for legal purposes, "peak" or "burst" bandwidth, ...

Well, sure.

Let's have a show of hands: today, who gets 53Kbits/sec throughput on
an X56 dialup?  Who gets 1.544Mbit/sec throughput on a T1?  Hmmn,
looks pretty quiet out there.

Everyone's overcommitted, nobody can provide full pipe bandwidth on the
connections they're selling now.  This isn't news.

It's also true that customers are going to get crabby if there isn't a
lot of local bits that they can get to with their spiffy ADSL
connection, but the telcos may have a small clue.  There's an ADSL
trial down the road in Ithaca which is very successful, and one of the
big reasons is that the users for the most part are connecting to
Cornell University which has both more internal and external bandwidth
than most continents.  

I talked to the local Time-Warner guy, who agrees that when they
install Roadrunner, they'll get a connection to Cornell as well (which
won't be hard, since Cornell is talking to them now about buying
bandwidth to connect up around town.)

I suspect that the real market for xDSL will be as much telecommuting
as web surfing, and so long as the telecommuters have a fast enough
connection to the office which will probably not be very far away,
that's all they care about.


-- 
John R. Levine, IECC, POB 727, Trumansburg NY 14886 +1 607 387 6869
johnl at iecc.com, Village Trustee and Sewer Commissioner, http://iecc.com/johnl, 
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