Moose, I am extremely interested in reading about your adventures with this
box. It is of great interest to me and my wife.
Here, most telephone numbers are transferable, called "portable" here.
> It was a political victory for consumer advocates.
>
Yes and no. EVERYBODY pays a LNP (Local Number Portability) charge in their
phone bill whether you use it or not. Good thing, too. It cost the industry
hundreds of millions of dollars to implement. My company alone had to spend
almost $20,000,000 just to upgrade one telephone switch to support LNP. And
then all the post 9/11 homeland security upgrades for violating our
privacy... ahem.
> and most homes rely on the landline for their broadband.
>
Not necessarily. Cable television companies in the USA still outsell the
telephone industry for broadband access, but just barely and it depends on
location. Broadband is so distance limited it's crazy. But the telephone
industry has a lot of technological tricks it can pull out to deliver decent
speeds up to ten miles out from the equipment.
The two come over the same wires, but may be separate for operational
> and billing purposes. I could drop the telephone service and keep DSL.
>
This would depend on the local telephone company. Not all allow for "naked
dsl".
Again, consumer advocates managed to force several provisions through
> that providers didn't much like.
Of course. We have several provisions in the laws that allow for anybody to
lease line-pairs to any address. A registered CLEC is able to even lease
switching capability--but that cuts into profit for the CLEC. Everybody
wants free access to the DSLAMs (Digital Subscriber Line Access
Multiplexers) because they are "owned by the telephone company therefore it
should be freely accessable." That is incorrect, though, because unlike
telephone service and all other regulated services (T1, T3, DS0, etc),
broadband has never been specifically regulated and is deployed as a means
of extra profit, not as a requirement. But unlike telephone switch
equipment, the cost of deployment and upgrading of the equipment is
expensive and short-term. Unlike switches which remain viable for 20-30
years, DSLAMs are only viable for about five. Cost of backbone connectivity
and equipment are costly. The REAL costs of broadband delivery per household
is somewhere around $30 per month.
It's all cyclical. A predecessor cable company was at first the only
> broadband provider where I live. Then DSL became available while cable
> didn't increase capacity to keep up with traffic and things slowed down,
> so I switched to the then superior DSL. Two owners later, cable has run
> optical fiber here and has much faster service, according to a neighbor,
> as well as their ads.
The "access loop" circuit is one thing, but backhaul connectivity is
another. Even a lowly low-speed DSL connection can be fast if the backbone
is sufficient, while a 20mb connection to the home over optical might sound
good but if the backhaul circuits are overloaded you still end up with trash
usabilty. A good rule of thumb is 20X oversubscription. We can comfortably
oversubscribe a backhaul 20x the sold bandwidth. Inotherwords, if the DSLAM
has an OC-3 connection for data backhaul, this is approximately 150mbps. 20x
of 150mbps is 3 gig of "sold bandwidth". Sounds like a lot, but if the
average customer is sold 10mbps download speeds, that's 3000/10 or 300
customers. Not bad until you consider that that access multiplexer is
serving 600 customers and getting a 40x oversubscription.
I just found out a couple minutes ago--my employer/telephone company just
got bought out. Looks like it's time to update my resume and get it in
circulation.
AG
--
_________________________________________________________________
Options: http://lists.thomasclausen.net/mailman/listinfo/olympus
Archives: http://lists.thomasclausen.net/mailman/private/olympus/
Themed Olympus Photo Exhibition: http://www.tope.nl/
|