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

To: MikeM54321 who wrote (1643)	7/23/1998 1:10:00 PM
From: DenverTechie	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 12823

Mike - what you are referring to is the distinction between voice network "traffic engineering" which attempts to trade off capital equipment cost against calling patterns vs. data transmission that is non time delivery sensitive and arrives in packets. Voice traffic engineering is based on the phenomenon that people use their phones for short periods of time on a random basis, but more often a certain times than other. It's extremely complicated (almost rocket science), but does not affect the xDSL service we're discussing. Suffice it to say, if the phone company provided enough equipment in their switched voice network to give everyone dial tone as if they use the phone all day they would go bankrupt very quickly. So the voice network will "block" you on occasion because they put in enough equipment to handle what is known as "busy hour busy day" traffic (like Mother's Day) at a say 10% blocking rate. But that network planning is AFTER the signal has been split off at the access node where voice is sent to the circuit switched network and data sent to the broadband network. The part of the network that is common when you take xDSL service is the distribution network, which gives you a hard wired dedicated connection between your home and the CO. You have your own little piece of twisted pair copper that is yours alone. The flip side of that, and another problem with DLCs doing xDSL, is that is not true. The DLC out in a neighborhood does act as a concentration point, putting 24 voice circuits (24 twisted pairs from homes) on to only 4 sets of twisted pairs back to the CO (sort of like a little remote CO). You really didn't want to know this much, did you? But you asked. As another piece of the answer, dedicated service at 1.5 Mb/s means that when you do make the connection (always the possibility of a cable cut or congestion at the ISP), your speed will never waver from 1.5 Mb/s throughput (unless line conditions change) This statement assumes the ISP and routers have been set up properly, as discussed in someone else's post. Cable modems will vary their speed and throughput to your computer as users enter and leave the network. So you could see 1.5 Mb/s one minute and 144 kb/s the next. Cable companies generally market the service as saying you will always get "at least" a certain speed and "could be as fast as" type claims because of the nature of the broadcast, shared medium. Hope this helps. Sorry for the complexity of the answer, but this is a tough area to explain.