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To: Glenn D. Rudolph who wrote (35172)	2/17/1998 7:59:00 PM
From: Gary Korn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 61433

ISDN is a dead end now in my opinion It dead ends right at my house. Gary Korn

To: Glenn D. Rudolph who wrote (35172)	2/17/1998 9:38:00 PM
From: blankmind	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 61433

correct me if i am wrong, but cable companies have traditionally provided the set top box, but normal modem equipment the consumer has purchased. do most cable companies provide the cable modem, or do you need to purchase it yourself? although cable modems supply more bandwith, dsl solution i believe will win out because consumers foot the bill for the equipment on their end, thus lessening the capital required for the rbocs to rollout a dsl technology. i hope the cable and phone companies lock in mortal battle and lower the prices to consumers.

To: Glenn D. Rudolph who wrote (35172)	2/17/1998 9:40:00 PM
From: blankmind	Respond to of 61433

ITU Advances DSL Agreement Wired News Report 5:02am 17.Feb.98.PST -- In a development that inches Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) Net access technology closer to US homes, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has picked the technology that will form the basis of its consumer-oriented high-speed Net access protocol. Comprised of delegates from nine countries, the ITU Study Group 15 agreed that Discrete Multitone (DMT) will form the basis of the line code for G.lite, the proposed standard for a lower-speed, consumer-oriented DSL technology. Consumer-oriented ADSL has been the focus of a PC and phone industry push to speed deployment of a consumer version of asymmetric digital subscriber line technology (ADSL). The five-star membership of this Universal ADSL Working Group (no relation to the ITU) includes Microsoft, Intel, Rockwell, Lucent, and Compaq from the PC world, as well as all of the country's regional Bell operating companies. Aimed at consumers, G.lite has a lower maximum data rate version of the proposed standard for full-speed ADSL, G.dmt. Its bit rates are up to 1.5 Mbps downstream and 512 Kbps upstream. In part, it is meant to be attractive to the local telephone companies central to the deployment of DSL equipment, because it doesn't require the installation of a signal splitter at the consumer's home. In addition to the consumer's own ADSL "modem," DSL equipment need only be installed at a phone company's central switching office. One of two primary DSL technologies, DMT beat out the other primary DSL technology of Carrier Amplitude/Phase modulation (CAP). While many communications equipment vendors have products employing both CAP and DMT, some companies have made CAP their favorite. Yet even these companies have banded with the industry-led Universal ADSL Working Group in its quest for an early splitterless-ADSL standard, showing, at least, a willingness to conform to whatever technology is agreed upon. Ken Krechmer, a communications consultant and a US delegate to the ITU, said the proposed G.lite standard would fulfill the requirements of the standard called for by the Universal ADSL Working Group. Krechmer and other ITU working group members hoping for an agreement on the various DSL-related standards by October of this year.

To: Glenn D. Rudolph who wrote (35172)	2/17/1998 9:55:00 PM
From: George T. Santamaria	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 61433

Cable has one very big advantage going for it in the form of reduced infrastructure installation and maintenance costs. A telco has to install and maintain a tw pr of wire for each cust all of the way to his exchange. Those big, thick black telephone cables that you see on poles have hundreds of twisted pair in each and there are numerous junctions that have to be spliced by hand over the route from the exchange to the customer's premises. Every time a car clips a pole or a manhole gets flooded and service is disabled, much of that hand labor has to be redone. Most of that infrastructure already exists but it is aging and it will someday have to be replaced at today's union labor costs. Much of the work in maintaining telco tw pr just goes into manually checking and rechecking the physical routing of a twisted pair through various junction boxes, manholes and cross-connects. The cable service for a cluster of hundreds of customers can be delivered over a single coax. At certain points or nodes in the network, data services for clusters of customers are combined into a fiber optic backbone and this connects the cable customers to the internet. All routing, other than the physical placement of those nodes and association of customers with particular nodes, can be handled electronically and the cost of doing that can only be expected to decline with time. I wouldn't be surprised if xDSL standardization efforts never get concluded. Cable operators have proven that they don't really need standardization to get their ISP operations off the ground.