Ken, from the very first paragraph of the article, I cringed.
The short version:
FR and ADSL are two different kinds of services, which solve different kinds of problems, and as such, their costs are not compared for any logical reason that I am aware of. So you can dismiss the fact that one is costlier than the other as useless information because they are not interchangeable services.
The long version:
The author states: >> Initially portrayed as a savior for bandwidth-constrained business users...<<
Perhaps Virginia had someone edit the piece, and that same someone misstated a few things... I've read other works of hers, before, and they were quite good, but this one has a few problems, IMHO.
For starters, the premise that ADSL was first viewed as an alternative for the business user seeking higher bandwidth is wrong. That happened later, when the Internet became the primary driver for bandwidth in the loop, but years before this, that was not the case.
ADSL was first conceived (in the form we have come to know it today) as a means for Telcos to deliver commercial cable grade video over twisted copper pairs, as well as simultaneously supporting POTS services. In its early stages it flunked in that role, badly. Or, let's put it another way (so I don't get flamed by the purists on this matter), it never materialized for a number of different reasons, and we'll leave it at that.
Today there are several Telco roll-outs taking place, e.g., Bell Atlantic (Boston and NY) and US West (Phoenix, just announced), to name a few, using the VDSL (Very-high-speed DSL) variant of this technology. And true, today the targeted market has expanded to also include SOHO, telecommuting, remote access, etc. for the business user, as well as business and residential internet uses. And it is true that the emphasis has shifted almost entirely to the latter, as opposed to video.
The cost comparison between Frame Relay and ADSL in the article baffles me for a number of reasons. Why would anyone want to do a cost comparison between an access technology (ADSL) and a WAN Cloud technology (FR), is beyond me. It wasn't merely a fluke or a flick-of-the-wrist type of mistake, because it is repeated several times and reinforced throughout the article. The fact is that this is a classical form of an apples-to-oranges comparison, so I would dismiss it. The rest of the article was good, though.
ADSL, as an access technology, extends from the customer location, ordinarily, to the central office edge concentrator. There it hands off to a wide area network technology, ordinarily. It is a local, physical link to the central office.
FR, on the other hand, is a wide area shared utility used by many users and begins either at the customer location (if the customer is so equipped) or more commonly at the central office edge, and extends through the central core of the carrier's network and on to the other edge, where it may once again hand off to a digital data circuit, and out to the customer location. At best, the ADSL link may be a part of the FR service, but only at the customer end points of the overall configuration.
HTH, Frank |
