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

To: axial who wrote (9396)	11/30/2000 4:17:28 AM
From: justone	Respond to of 12823

Ray: Yes, exactly. The problem (or one of the problems, it seems to me) seems to be the difficulty of doing field work on the network without bringing the affected area down completely. In most of the cases that I cited, where I had service interruptions, inquiries revealed that service work was being performed: it was never possible to find out what the nature of that work might be, either with DSL or cable. The distinction, as previously noted, was that my DSL line always offered phone service, regardless of whether the high-speed internet connection worked. If I recall DSL properly, that would make sense, because of the two-tiered way DSL works. This is a rather good point that I haven't considered enough- working on a shared access media is always a single point of failure due to manual problems, if nothing else (no jokes about recounting ballots by hand vs. machine, please). I have followed up on some service interruptions, and found that most occurred while they were changing IP routing addresses. Now this updating problem can no doubt be solved- it is partially due to the fact that they are expanding so fast they have to change the addresses so often using older routers that don't do this well, I guess- but other problems may take out the head end router. I don't know if anyone is making a fully redundant head end- I must check on this. Now DSL data and VOIP/DSL will suffer the same problem- but they have the primarily line as a fall back option. In a general sense, I get the feeling that providers feel no obligation to maintain a service level, absent regulatory requirements. Cost is a disincentive to redundancy or parallelism that would maintain throughput, while isolating and allowing upgrades/repairs. I only somewhat agree with you for data.. No one like service interruptions or irritated customers. What I think happens is they balance cost/expansion speed vs. that dissatisfaction. How much of the disruption is due to incompetence, lack of redundancy, or update/expansion I don't know. Say 1/3 each. DSL will do no better on 2/3's of the problem. In fact, I recall from my reliability engineering days that, typically, a phone outage is due about 25% to hardware, 25% software, 40% manual error, and 10% 'other'. Redundancy only addresses the hardware portion. So DSL may only have a slight edge as a fall back option when you take out the IP network on an upgrade. When voice is brought into the mix the issue is different. There is competition with wireline and mobile access. In order to compete, the cable people have mandated that the standards support superior reliability. So one of the challenges of a HFC/DOCSIS/PacketCable network is to support this. In any case the market will decide this issue. My own tentative opinion is that I will get a cell phone in case a tree falls on either my wire or cable, and cable voice/data/video/long distance/VOD/videoconfering for my "non-mission critical" communication services. Hey, ATT could do it all. Wouldn't it be nice if they bundled phone, cellular, video, data- oh- that was LAST month's strategy. Never mind.