Residential Broadband Single Point of Failure (was RE: [ale] DSL Data Points (Long and meandering))

[Davis, Ricardo C.]

My $0.02 regarding residential broadband:

Fulton's experience is not uncommon. One of the reasons why I haven't signed
up for ADSL for my home office is Davis' Corollary to Murphy's Law:  the
probability of a ADSL network outage is geometrically proportional to the
need to perform time sensitive work from the home office.

A few months ago when I shopped around for ADSL & Cable Modem service, none
of the providers included the ability to connect to their POP via 56K
without charging extra per hour rates (yikes!)  I was about to sign up with
Telocity, when my neighbor who has their service related to me a multi-day
outage during the week...and at that time they didn't have an alternative
means to connect to their network.  That may be OK for kiddies who probably
need to take a break from their online role-playing game habit, but when
that quickly-requested report needs to be in by close of business I can't
take the chance.



-----Original Message-----
From: Fulton Green [mailto:ale at FultonGreen.com]
To: ale at ale.org
Sent: Saturday, December 16, 2000 7:39 PM
Subject: Re: [ale] DSL Data Points (Long and meandering)


Having done both sides of the broadband eqn. (wireless and satellite
notwithstanding), I'll concur that on average, getting cable-based service
is *much* faster than getting DSL service. Though I'd have to say that my
DSL experience was much more pleasant than the things I've heard on here.
While I can't remember exact dates, here's a "guesstimate" of how long it
took for me to get DSL through Telocity:

Day 0: move into new dwelling, I get new phone #
4 weeks later: new phone # finally registered in BellSouth DSL database
1 week later: database finally propagates to Telocity, I order service
3 weeks later: Telocity tells me setup is complete, I hook up gateway,
  start surfing within ten minutes

FWIW, I now consider Telocity a mixed bag. They should be commended
for *explicitly* supporting Linux. I also like that they assign a
consistently static IP through DHCP instead of PPPoE, and I've only had one
instance of a signal droppage between my gateway and the local area router.
Unfortunately, I've experienced *severe* problems this past week due to poor
routing configurations within their backbone piping.

Just my $0.02 worth ...
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