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To: Scrapps who wrote (8275)	3/28/2000 12:11:00 AM
From: Perry P.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9236

dailynews.yahoo.com Great article. This is a must read. A small excerpt I thought summed up the explosive opportunity coming in a few months. <<<<<Brighter Days The economic picture for ISPs will change dramatically this summer, when the FCC's nationally ordered line-sharing initiative is supposed to go into effect. Line sharing will require an incumbent telephone company to allow a data services competitor to have access to existing phone lines, which can be equipped with Asymmetric DSL access, operating at download speeds up to 1.5 megabits per second, that won't interfere with the existing voice service. Line sharing will drop the cost of DSL deployment to CLECs and ISPs in multiple ways. First and foremost, it will drop the cost of the DSL line itself by 50 percent. In Minnesota, where line sharing was initially tested and is now available commercially, the price of a copper line dropped from $18 to $6, Rhythms' Foster said. More importantly, Foster said, the cost and time involved in getting a DSL customer up and running will be sharply reduced. "Provisioning a line can take up to two months today, because you have to order that new line from the Bell company, wait for them to set it up and hope they do it right the first time," Foster said. "During all that time, you have to stay in touch with the customer, and it takes time and people to do that. With line sharing, we'll know which line the service goes onto, and since that line is already up and running, there won't be the lengthy delay." It has been during the delay period - between the time when an ISP or its CLEC partner ordered a line from an incumbent and the time that line was actually installed - that the Bells are stealing customers, ISPs have claimed. If those claims are accurate, line sharing would represent a diminished opportunity for customers to jump from the ISP/CLEC offering to that of an incumbent. "We think we can get customers turned up in a week vs. six to eight weeks," Foster said. G.Lite, the long-awaited consumer-installable version of DSL, is also coming into the network this summer, NorthPoint's Levine said. "We think this will be the first truly consumer-installable product, where you aren't asking the consumer to do what a technician has been doing," she added. Combined with line sharing, G.Lite helps eliminate most of the role that telephone companies play in helping ISPs install their services and get customers set up. If customers can order modems from their ISPs or buy them at retail outlets, then order a service that can be set up within a week on existing phone lines, with less intervention by the incumbents, ISPs will be able to connect customers more quickly and at lower cost.>>>>>> Perry