Technology News
RMI.net, Earthlink To Deliver DSL Service
(10/15/99, 5:51 p.m. ET)
By Salvatore Salamone, InternetWeek
IT managers looking to DSL service as an economical way to connect their telecommuters and branch offices now have more choices.
Service providers RMI.net and Earthlink this week announced plans to deliver high-speed access services.
RMI.net has been offering DSL in Phoenix and Denver for about a year, but will expand to a total of 17 cities by the end of this month. The company will deploy its own service in five cities and partner with other DSL providers, including U S West and Covad Communications, to serve the remainder of the cities.
More widescale DSL availability is something IT managers welcome.
"We've had limited choice when looking for DSL," said William Perkins, IS director, Addison Insurance. "My hope is that as more providers offer service, it will reach locations where the service has not been widely available and that I might be able to even price-shop."
A number of factors, including the cost to the provider and the market acceptance of the service, have limited DSL deployment. But the market is changing rapidly right now.
"Competitive local exchange carriers are planning to offer several hot new services, including DSL, VPN and voice over IP in the next 12 months," said Michael Howard, principal analyst and founder of Infonetics Research. An Infonetics study of the CLECs market published this summer found that "all of our respondents plan to offer DSL services," said Howard. One major obstacle with DSL has been the cost to the provider to deploy the service. Still, new equipment is making this less of an issue.
For instance, RMI.net will use a platform called the ERX Subscriber Access Switch from Unisphere to deploy its service. The ERX Switch sits between Internet backbone routers and DSL Access Multiplexers. The key feature of such new devices is that they combine the performance of ASIC-based backbone routers so RMI.net can aggregate lots of traffic with the same flexibility they would have with software-based systems. "It gives us lots of capacity for DSL and the ability to offer our own differentiated services," said Jim Comstock, RMI.net's vice president of technology and operations.
The software that runs on the ERX is called the Subscriber Access Feature Pack. It will enable RMI.net to, for example, offer and bill customers for services with different performance or quality levels.
Additionally this month, Earthlink announced it is now offering DSL service in New York City, Los Angeles, Dallas, and Charlotte, N.C. And the company plans to have service available in Minneapolis, Boston, San Francisco, and San Diego by the end of this year. The Earthlink DSL service starts at $49.95 per month.
=================================================================
It look's like RMI.net will have their "own" DSL network for two cities and resell "other" DSL lines for the other cities they deliver services to.
EKS |
