lml, Ken, and All,
This sudden rash of last mile problems reminds me of a song written by Thelonious Sphere Monk, titled "Misterioso."
In some earlier posts I hypothesized how some outside cable plant (pair-related) problems might come about, but I think it's too early in the game to be looking at those in a pervasive way at this time. Neither cross-talk in the sheath, nor pair substitutions which favor DSL. Instead, one area that I think is actually being "tuned" or undergoing adaptation in order to prepare for an onslaught of high-speed DSLs is the edge.
It would stand to reason that if an ILEC encounters a need at a particular central office (or cluster of COs) for a sudden 20- to 100-fold increase in pulling power from the core, then they will need to make some adjustments in their overall edge strategy, since the edge sits directly between the access platforms and the core. When they fiddle with the edge, at best, they upset the previous network balance.
Such fiddling seldom results in a 100% correctly-tuned environment on the the first attempt. It usually requires iterative poking and prodding to bring into proper balance for the longer term. The provider may decide to re-partition routers, juggle around some PVCs, add some links, or establish higher priorities to the higher SLA accounts, re-allocate buffers and re-weight queues, or something along those lines in order to ensure a proportionate improvement in performance to the higher speed (and higher paying) customer.
Thus, possibly relegating the other group of dialup- and ISDN- users to a lower percentage of overall resources, which really boils down to, in plain English, less sucking power per cheapo end user. It needn't always be this way, but I suspect that in many cases it will be this way. This is an overly simplistic description of what is actually taking place on some levels, but it demonstrates some of the tuning considerations that must be taken into account. You can infer for yourself how this may affect lower speed users in the future, when it comes to getting their fair share of bandwidth resources.
Regards, Frank Coluccio |
