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To: John Stichnoth who wrote (6236)	1/12/2000 2:15:00 PM
From: Zakrosian	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 12823

John - Sounds similar to the situation in the DC area. After a year of being told to check back in 2 months, they finally installed equipment. Only problem was they couldn't provide service to my neighborhood, where it seems like half the households were waiting for greater bandwidth. So we all signed up for RoadRunner, which has generally been great. No installation charges, less than 50 bucks a month (actually saved money when I cancelled my second phone line and AOL), and consistent line speeds of about 300 to 700 kbps - assuming those bandwidth test results are accurate. I'm beginning to wonder whether the telcos aren't in danger of becoming an endangered species.

To: John Stichnoth who wrote (6236)	1/12/2000 2:25:00 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12823

John, Re: >>megabit speeds are overkill with the web in its present state<< Ordinarily, and for the vast majority of consumer related subscriptions, what you say would be entirely true. Especially when the provider inserts your data into a limited bandwidth pool at the edge of the network, such as most all-you-can-chance-for dsls, do. In this regard, DSL has no advantage over any other high speed pipe, when offered in this manner. The key here is the level and type of upstream provisions that your basic provider has in place to contend with the vagaries of the 'net. ----------- I'd just like to say a few words about another class of dsls that doesn't get much mention, here. Some [of the national and other specialized] dsl providers offer, along with other enhancements in their professional services suites, the ability to avoid this now all-too-common trajedy-of-the-commons effect, such as you imply. They do this by "guaranteeing" minimum service levels in their SLAs made possible by invoking QoS/CoS measures. But now we're definitely NOT talking about casual surfing needs as a function of affordability, for most. Instead, these are symmetrical pipes with near-deterministic qualities, at least in the access layer and across their own backbones or those which they have some control over. In this manner they are able to offer higher speed VPN service to corporates, since they can carry you deeper at higher levels of service assurance, when both or multiple end points are communicating over the same cloud service. And in many of these instances, ATM plays a key role in the access platform, along with other Layer 2 tunneling protocols across their clouds. Frank