More details on the HarvardNet stuff, from Telechoice's site:
telechoice.com
Do Consumers Care What the x in xDSL Stands For?
December 3, 1996 -- A Boston-based ISP has launched what it calls an ADSL service but closer inspection
reveals that the service is actually based on single-pair HDSL. While industry insiders might find it amusing that
a service provider would willingly market one technology as another in order to garner some headlines, this
marcom approach should raise a warning signal for the DSL industry.
Providers cannot afford to get their consumers caught up in this alphabet soup of technology. SDSL, ADSL,
IDSL, RADSL, HDSL and VDSL are all variants on a common theme: high speed digital access. If providers
and vendors market the application and not the technology, they'll have far more success. What follows are
excerpts from Harvard Net's press release. While they refer to their technology as ADSL and SDSL, it actually
appears to be single-pair HDSL. But a subscriber line by any other name would smell just as sweet.
Businesses can take advantage of guaranteed high speed service with HarvardNet's 768K ADSL
dedicated-line service. "In our market, businesses are not willing to bet their networks on consumer dial-up
services with over-committed backbone connectivity and inexperienced technical support" states HarvardNet
President Bill Southworth. "With these new services, we offer a premium quality Internet connection at a slightly
higher price. We guarantee the bandwidth of our customer's connection to the Internet."
HarvardNet has also announced the installation of Boston's first ADSL Internet circuits in selected customer
beta sites. Using a variant of ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line), called SDSL (Single-line Digital
Subscriber Line), the circuits provide 384K or 768K Internet service over traditional POTS two-wire copper
phone circuits. Following completion of testing in mid-December, HarvardNet plans to expand the service
throughout Boston and Cambridge. "xDSL promises to lower the cost of fractional-T1 Internet service in Boston
by half, and provide new high performance services such as full-bandwidth video networks," according to Chip
Ach, HarvardNet's Director of Engineering.
Pricing and which vendors are being used was not available at posting time.
Founded in 1993 as a government contractor specializing in high performance networking solutions for video
and imaging, HarvardNet became a commercial provider of Internet services in 1995. The company has grown
rapidly over the past year to become a leading business Internet Service Provider for the Boston metropolitan
area. The company hosts web sites for over a thousand domains on a web server cluster using HarvardNet
proprietary load-balancing software. The twenty-four Pentium Pro web servers in the cluster are capable of
handling individual web sites with up to 1.5 million hits per hour and individual FTP sites with hundreds of
thousands of downloads per day. HarvardNet's reputation for high performance web hosting and access has
attracted a customer list consisting of Fortune 100 companies and many of the Internet's most active web sites.
HarvardNet has established strategic relationships with a number of leading companies, including Microsoft,
Netscape, CyberCash, Bay Networks, and US Robotics. For more information please contact the HarvardNet
web site at harvard.net. |
