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To: Raymond Duray who wrote (5519)	10/9/1999 12:36:00 AM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 12823

Ray, and your post makes me wonder, too, but from the other direction. "The difficulties experienced by the users of the DSL vis a vis NetMeeting and ICQ make my little difficulties with Hughes DirecPC seem trivial in comparison. I had not realized that the DSL implementation could be so convoluted. Is it DSL, which conforms to Internet norms? Or, is it ICQ and NetMeeting which made some assumptions which were not well thought out? Regards, Frank Coluccio

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (5519)	10/9/1999 4:25:00 PM
From: RTev	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12823

DSL is not a slam-dunk, but most of the problems that uswest.net ran into recently were unique to that one ISP. The competing ISPs that offer service on US West DSL lines have mostly managed to avoid the issues, either by using the same bridging mode that uswest.net abandoned or by offering static IP addresses as a standard part of their service. The problems are, unfortunately, typical of US West. It was bad planning compounded by bad customer service, a situation that would be familiar to all those hundreds of homeowners in new suburban developments who have waited months for POTS service. What's most unfortunate about it all is that the DSL service itself has been excellent in my experience. Once I got over the order-process nightmare of getting the service set up at the CO, it has been mostly rock-solid. Even on their newsgroup where complaints are magnified, there are only occasional squawks about disconnects or slow service. But then another part of the company introduced a change too early and without anticipating the problems that would arise. Had they waited three months for the release of the new CBOS (Cisco Broadband Operating System, by the way), they would have avoided three-quarters of the complaints. They might even have avoided some complaints had they put more information about workarounds on their own web site. But they didn't do that. They were surprised -- an emotion that seems common at that outfit.