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Technology Stocks : LAST MILE TECHNOLOGIES - Let's Discuss Them Here -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (5517)	10/8/1999 5:15:00 PM
From: RTev	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 12823

The early implementations at USW, as I understand it, were and are exclusively Cisco. Accoring to this nifty site, dslreports.com, and confirmed by other reports, USW uses Cisco DSLAMs and Cisco (originally NetSpeed) 675 or 605 routers at the customer site. They might be using something else like RBAK in the secondary-wave markets, but I haven't heard anything about that. We talked about the Alcatel connection downstream. Frank pointed out that most of the RBOCs made an joint equipment agreement with them, but USW did not participate. Here's some more trivia from a year-long user of USW DSL: Like most of the RBOCs (with the apparent exception of the oddly independent Cincinnati Bell), US West offers DSL with a choice of ISPs but also runs a non-regulated and separately billed ISP of its own. That US West + uswest.net combination has been unique in allowing DSL customers from the beginning to connect multiple machines to their DSL service. The other RBOCs use various methods including static IP addresses or even mapped MAC addresses to preclude multiple-machine connections. It's a nice feature, but it has caused significant problems. They apparently failed to anticipate the number of machines that would be so connected. In the beginning uswest.net configured the Cisco 675s to operate in bridged mode. To supply internet connections to all machines on a home or business network one needed only to plug the 675 and each machine into a hub. Uswest.net would supply a unique dynamic IP address to each machine. That method exhausted their pool of addresses more quickly than anticipated. The solution that uswest.net decided on was to reconfigure their system to use PPP routed mode in which the 675 is assigned a single IP address and NAT is used for each machine on a local net. Without much explanation, they shifted users over to that configuration in several markets and then began to hear a huge outpouring of complaints. The 675 was still using NetSpeed's OS with an awkward NAT implementation. Game players and users of other specialized protocols (ICQ and NetMeeting especially) found that they had to become net admins, even if they were using just a single machine. Specific ports had to be opened in the 675's NAT table to allow such applications to work properly. The table entries ran to several hundred lines since the router's OS did not allow wild-card or range entries. Because each entry included the current IP address of the router, the whole table had to be changed if the dynamic address of the router changed. It was a mess, and uswest.net was not prepared to handle the questions or problems. Since then, Cisco has released a new version of what they call CBOS for the router which has fixed many of the problems. USWest.net also delayed implementation of the routing mode in several markets. The number of complaints has slowed on the uswest.net DSL newsgroup, but hasn't yet stopped.