RBOCs vow 1999 will be DSL's year
By Tim Greene
Network World, 08/17/98
Long berated as foot draggers in the race to
offer high-speed digital subscriber line
services, the big regional phone companies are
making noises that 1999 will be the year for
DSL.
Here's what you can expect from the RBOCs
next year:
BellSouth will offer DSL that is faster
than T-1 but slower than T-3. The
offering will come with guaranteed
quality of service for ATM over DSL.
Bell Atlantic will launch DSL services
that boast various servjust going point to
point.
US WEST will be able to support more
customers with its Megabit service.
While business customers will have to pay far
more than residential customers, the added
corporate features warrant the extra cost,
regional Bell operating companies claim.
Current residential DSL service for Internet
access is just raw bandwidth, with no
guaranteed speed across the entire network.
"It's an as-is service. If it works, it works, and
if the customer is satisfied, fine," says John
Cahill, executive director of BellSouth's
advanced networking division.
Even as they tout new offerings, RBOCs
acknowledge they cannot offer DSL
everywhere. They are going to target
metropolitan areas where large numbers of
people telecommute and businesses need to
connect remote sites.
"Our thrust is to connect as many of our
customers as possible with broadband access
to network services. The problem is, when you
get into rural areas, the cost is prohibitive,"
says Matt Rotter, executive director of US
WEST's Megabit DSL services.
Next year, BellSouth is looking to offer DSL
services that will run over new or specially
conditioned copper lines and will support
higher bandwidths. "It will use ATM quality of
service on part of the link at a higher price,"
Cahill says.
Business customers want service-level
guarantees for availability, bandwidth and time
to repair, he says.
Bell Atlantic also wants to offer different
service-quality levels and prioritization
schemes. DSL is now considered a
point-to-point connection, but in the middle of
1999, Bell Atlantic will offer a service
supporting multiple destinations, according to
Fran Leithead, Bell Atlantic product manager
for XDSL business marketing.
Multiple destination support will be
accomplished using a DSL scheme whipped
up by industry heavyweights, including
Microsoft, Cisco and FORE, to run PPP
sessions over ATM over a DSL link.
This way, one customer could connect with an
ISP in one PPP session, for example, and start
a new session connecting to the corporate
network using PPP over ATM.
The scheme requires outfitting the customer
site with an ATM interface to the DSL line.
Bell Atlantic is also shooting for symmetric
DSLs to fill the void between 56K bit/sec
dedicated lines and T-1 lines.
Most current DSL services are asymmetric,
with download speeds more than double the
upload speeds. "Our plans are to get
[DSL-based] fractional T-1 services out to the
business market that would be competitively
priced," says Liethead.
He says the company is weighing how high to
set prices for its business-class DSL by
looking at what it already charges for
similar-speed frame relay and ATM services.
Down at BellSouth
BellSouth's Cahill says his company is looking
at symmetric DSL at speeds faster than T-1
but slower than T-3.
The symmetric DSL implementations are
nothing more than fractional T-1 and T-3
under a different name, according to Frank
Dzubeck, president of Communications
Network Architects in Washington, D.C.
In fact, RBOCs already use high-bit-rate DSL
to provision T-1 lines.
Meanwhile, competitive local exchange
carriers (CLEC) push symmetric DSL,
Dzubeck says. "But really what they're
implementing is fractional T-1. They can't call it
that because if they do, they'll get into the bind
of RBOC comparisons," he says. "DSL is
used as a digital local loop equivalent of T-1
services, and that's where it should be at this
moment, trying to knock down those T-1
prices."
Problems solved
While they are bristling now with bright ideas
about DSL, RBOCs have been far slower to
deploy the technology than CLECs. In part,
DSLs say, that is because they face a raft of
technical and regulatory problems and market
pressures CLECs don't.
Some potential customers are skeptical.
"Maybe they are letting some of the leaders go
out there and establish a market presence for
DSL. It makes you wonder if it is going to be
one of those things where there will be a lot of
hoopla, then nothing happens," says Rick
Curry, a store technical operations team leader
for J.C. Penney.
But the RBOCs can and do rattle off a long list
of impediments. The RBOCs are prevented by
the Federal Communications Commission from
offering long-distance service, which means
they cannot directly link sites that span local
calling areas without calling in a longdistance
carrier. This limitation hobbles RBOCs when
they try to offer end-to-end services to
customers, the RBOCs say.
Waiting for standards
RBOCs also evaluate gear by stringent
routines so they only put case-hardened
equipment in their networks. That testing takes
longer than the tests CLECs might use.
And RBOCs, more so than the competitive
carriers, have waited for standards to settle
down. With their greater reach, the RBOCs
say they need to install gear that can be
installed and maintained across their service
areas.
That is not so much a problem for CLECs,
according to Eric Geis, general manager for
the western region for Rhythms, a
Colorado-based CLEC. If Rhythms has
pockets of unique gear, that's OK to a limited
degree, Geis says.
Despite standards problems, US WEST dove
into DSL early with its Megabit service, and
had to decide whether DSL sales would hurt
other services.
"Some customers who are probably buying
Megabit would have bought ISDN. [With
Megabit] they clearly get more bandwidth for
less money," USWEST's Rotter says.
Some critics say RBOCs also fear
cannibalizing their T-1 services, which are
close in bandwidth to some DSL offerings.
DSL prices are typically a fifth or less than T-1
prices.
But even competitors see DSL as
supplemental to T-1 services, not as a
replacement. "For many of our industrial
customers, that is exactly their network design.
A fraction of their links are T-1 lines, another
proportion are DSL. DSL is an addition
instead of a replacement," says Gloria Farler,
vice president of marketing for Rhythms.
That may change, she adds, as pragmatic
network managers become more confident in
the reliability of DSL.
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