To: John Stichnoth who wrote (3551 ) 5/6/1999 8:06:00 AM From: Frank A. Coluccio Respond to of 12823
John, I see that Dave beat me to the punch with the pricing references which could be used for comparative purposes. But I would be cautious about drawing any conclusions from those price tags. If the Covads and the Northpoints of the world are doing their jobs correctly, most of their DSL offerings will resemble those of marie-and-mario.com's in name, only. But they will need to be worlds apart in features and the comprehensiveness of solutions offered. Commercial grade DSLs will, by their very nature, require certain superior levels of service assurance and SLA-like properties in order for them to survive and prosper. They will need to compete with extremely determistic services such as ATM, ISDN and dedicated lines. To be sure, these comparable service levels will be essential in order for them to garner the types of fees that they're requesting for their services. The options I'm referring to are those which would contrast with a simple best effort Internet access-only type. Best effort at higher speeds may be all that's necessary for satisfying residential end users seeking web access for the moment. In contrast, commercial users will be looking for portals into voice, VPNs, assured levels of QoS/ToS, security, customized gateways for extranets, etc. These require far more extensive levels of network architecting, and infrastructrue preparedness and upkeep (both operationally and planning-wise) than simple DSLAMs and edge connectivity schemes that mario might pick up at Radio Shack. Hence, the higher costs. The model that I may have asked for in previous posts may only be an over-reach type of exercise, in the fianl analysis, in order to force the issue of making these comparisons, but there is no single set of attributes that can used for the purposes of comparison to satisfy all of the emerging dsl venues on an equal basis. Looking forward to other comments and corrections. Regards, Frank Coluccio