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

To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (1534)	7/7/1998 10:11:00 AM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 12823

Can you relate to this? ============= FROM THE ETHER - Early good news from rural MVL DSL trial/ Big boost to Internet speed July 7, 1998 InfoWorld via NewsEdge Corporation : A digital subscriber line (DSL) now shares the 22,000-foot copper pair that brings plain old telephone service (POTS) to our farm in Maine. Thanks to our very own little DSL trial, we now enjoy continuous Internet at hundreds of kilobits per second. Your farm, however, especially if you live on a remote island such as Manhattan, is probably stuck with a dial-up analog telephone modem that busies your POTS line and runs at a tenth the speed. I'd like to help solve this problem by reporting that, unless you're a bumbling and/or conniving telephone monopoly, DSL isn't all that hard. Paradyne is a major DSL supplier spun off from AT&T and is providing Multiple Virtual Line (MVL) equipment for our DSL trial. See paradyne.com. The Lincolnville Telephone Company (LTC) operates the telephone central office 22,000 feet from our farm. Feisty little LTC also operates our cable TV service and is an ISP, at tidewater.net. Midcoast Internet Solutions is our farm's equally feisty little ISP, at midcoast.com. The hard part of our trial was connecting Paradyne's DSL equipment in LTC's central office to Midcoast's Internet point of presence (POP). LTC ran a 1.5Mbps T1 line to Midcoast's POP, which is 45 minutes southwest by car. Today's price for such a T1 line is $1,000 per month. LTC installed Paradyne's MVL splitter, controller, and DSL access multiplexer (DSLAM) in one refrigerator-size rack in LTC's central office. This took about four hours (at a cost of $200). The other end of my 22,000-foot telephone pair runs through an inch-thick "binder group" into a car-size main distribution frame (MDF) in LTC's central office. From there it goes into Paradyne's breadbox-size splitter, which runs POTS back to the MDF and then on to LTC's truck-size voice switch. Paradyne's splitter takes the DSL from my telephone pair and runs it down its rack to Paradyne's breadbox-size DSLAM. Internet packets flow up and down the rack between the DSLAM and Paradyne's breadbox-size controller. The controller exchanges my packets with a specified ISP, in this case with Midcoast, via T1. On my desk up at the farm, I have Paradyne's book-size 768Kbps MVL modem. My 22,000-foot POTS line snaps into one RJ-11 port. My telephone snaps into another. And into the modem's RJ-45 port snaps any Ethernet device -- for now my Macintosh, later our Ethernet hub. The MVL modem senses its DSLAM, and together they monitor at what rate they can reliably exchange packets. In my case, 22,000 feet from a central office in rural Maine, this turns out to be 320Kbps. When I pick up my phone to make a voice call, MVL drops to 192Kbps. How much does MVL cost? Paradyne has a starter kit for feisty little telephone companies and ISPs. For the first 20 subscribers, it's $20,000, or after discounts, $1,000 per subscriber, including all MVL central office equipment and subscriber-installed DSL modems. After another engineering iteration and rollout to 100,000 subscribers, Paradyne says MVL will drop below $400. Well, $1,000 could be written off in 24 months at $42 per month. At $400, your farm's MVL could be written off over five years at $7 per month. Good news, yes, but there are some complications. None of these monthly costs includes the Internet service behind the DSL. For example, I now pay Midcoast $350 per month for the Internet services behind the 56Kbps line I now lease from LTC for $250 per month. The Internet response I'm actually getting through MVL is not yet nearly 10 times that of POTS. There are many Internet bottlenecks. We don't know if we would get 320Kbps were other MVL subscribers to share our binder groups. What if we lived closer to LTC and got MVL's full 768Kbps? Paradyne's MVL is not based on standards being pursued by the Universal ADSL Working Group ( uawg.org) and the Home Phoneline Networking Alliance ( homepna.org). DSL should start small and evolve competitively with improving technologies and growing markets, like Ethernet did. But this is not how regulated telephone monopolies work. I'm worried that, even if our little DSL trial is successful, it will be discontinued by our public utilities commission, or overpriced out of the barnyard based on today's 56Kbps and T1 lines. Stay tuned. Internet pundit Bob Metcalfe invented Ethernet in 1973 and founded 3Com in 1979. Send e-mail to metcalfe@idg.net or see idg.net.