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To: Bill Lin who wrote (2668)	12/29/1998 12:11:00 PM
From: Kenneth E. Phillipps	Respond to of 12823

Bill - Thank you for your response. I am no expert but, in defense of the article, I think it was written from the standpoint of the residential consumer rather than the business consumer. From that standpoint, the article makes some good points. I have not used a cable modem but I have certainly read comments on this thread from people with cable modems who complain about access speed because of too many hookups on the same line. Just this morning, I am experiencing delays on the SI site - probably from congestion on the internet but also possibly because of too much server traffic. I know my ISP limits the number of connections per modem (I believe 5 to a modem) which is one reason I have stayed with them. Thanks again for your informed response. Ken

To: Bill Lin who wrote (2668)	12/29/1998 3:51:00 PM
From: ftth	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12823

Hi Bill, I think you read that article with expectations of a discussion of a different topic. I wouldn't say that makes it a piece of crap. In fact, if there are specific statements which you believe are wrong, please quote them and we'll discuss them further. This is one of the few articles I've seen that points out the fallacy of the marketing claims, rather that further hyping them by merely cutting-and-pasting from provider websites. For that, I commend the author. I'm not sure what in the article led you to believe it would discuss business applications--it seemed pretty end-consumer-user-focussed from the get-go. I'm not clear exactly what you thought was crap because it seems you contradicted one of your points of disagreement: <<economics force these ISPs to provide data services using the "oversubscription" business model. You guys know this>> then: <<2) if you have low paying customers, then you gotta oversubscribe like crazy. The article assumes all ISP biz models are 2), which is absurd>> In my interpretation, the point of the article was simply: consumer beware.....cable modems and DSL don't cure the internet access speed problems, despite the marketing claims. The statement that 2x (rather than the 100x claims) is a more accurate average improvement will turn some heads, and is roughly accurate from my direct experience and measurements. The standard deviation of these numbers is huge though, so averages have little meaning (but they are certainly more meaningful than absolute-peak-when-all-planets-are-properly-aligned-and everyone-holds-their-breath figures). I think the end consumer could care less what specific architectural or topological reasons there are for slowdowns further upstream, because there's scant little they can do about that. They don't even really have a choice between cable and DSL (except in a very few instances), so arguments for or against one or the other don't have much significance. Even if you have, say, @HOME service available, it's not like you can say, naw, I don't like their network architecture, I'd rather have xyz as my provider. @HOME is a good example, because their network architecture is touted as one of the most advanced, designed by legends in their own mind, bla, bla, bla. In the entire time I've had the service, I don't think I've ever gone more that 3 consecutive weeks without an outage. Most of the time I have an outage and call in, they don't even know about it. So much for the advanced Network Operations Center and diagnostics! And this is state of the art? Anyway, back to the main point of my rebuttal: you do raise good points from the business subscriber perspective, because they have different options and different factors in their provider decision. I don't feel the article failed in this regard because that wasn't the intent. I think any Joe-consumer that read that article would learn something they didn't know regarding high BW internet connections because so much false and misleading information has been circulated by journalists cutting-and-pasting marketing hype portrayed as researched fact, then cutting-and-pasting each other's 2nd generation hype, and on and on. dh