choosing DSL provider

olasek

olasek

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olasek
Not sure I understand the business side of being a DSL "provider".

For example in my home (California) I am getting DSL bundled with my phone line and I pay AT&T a nominal monthly fee for that. Now, some other company (WDT out of Chicago) is telling me they can provide me with the DSL + digital stationary phone line + unlimited call in the US + some international calls, etc, etc, etc, and if my calculation is correct I think will be saving about $20 a month (but I will figure it out before committing). The problem is in accounting for all the local taxes hence my statement above "I think". My concern is the DSL bandwith I will be getting. Can my provider being out of Chicago affect (adversely) my DSL speed/availability or my speed is primarily controlled by my physical address, distance to nearest switches, in other words purely local hardware considerations that have nothing to do with the provider?
 
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olasek said:
Not sure I understand the business side of being a DSL "provider".

For example in my home (California) I am getting DSL bundled with my phone line and I pay AT&T a nominal monthly fee for that. Now, some other company (WDT out of Chicago) is telling me they can provide me with the DSL + digital stationary phone line + unlimited call in the US + some other international call, etc, etc, etc, and if my calculation is correct I think will be saving about $20 a month (but I will figure it out before committing). The problem is in accounting for all the local taxes hence my statement above "I think". My concern is the DSL bandwith I will be getting. Can my provider being out of Chicago affect (adversely) my DSL speed/availability or my speed is primarily controlled by my physical address, distance to nearest switches, in other words purely local hardware considerations that have nothing to do with the provider?
Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure you will be using the exact same infrastructure at the neighborhood level.
 
Henning is mostly right. The folks from Chicago lease the local lines in bulk from the local phone company. The phone company is required.to lease them. The DSLAM is about the same between the companies. The only difference should be the backhaul.

That said, from personal experience (yes, SBC, I'm talking about you) when the local phone company also sells DSL service they have no incentive at all to provide a good line to thr CLEC.... Therefore you are likely to get a bettr line from the phone compsgy.

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Actually most RBOCs carry the DSL subscribers to a head-end that's on a fiber ring that has MPLS or similar access out to the CLEC. They're saving money not having to deal with the customer service calls from subscribers.

So the CLEC can usually undercut their price by a bit. Often at the expense of worse customer service, but not always. Some RBOC's Union staff are so much more expensive that the CLEC can actually attract non-Union staff at lower overall costs.

It's pretty convoluted. But then again so are "common carrier" petroleum pipelines where different grades of product are pumped in and slightly mixed at the interfaces and the companies who take it off the pipelines have enormous accounting systems to track the changes and the over-underages.

In the end, the gear from your house to the DSLAM or CO is the same. The gear from the DSLAM to the CO is the same. The gear from the CO to the hub CO or co-location point is the same, and there's a big pipe from there going to the RBOC's core systems and another to the CLEC's core. That's usually where they spilt.

Once there, the differences are in the services and servers and the customer support and engineering staff quality. Those are hard to measure but major problems show up as generally uninformed consumer complaints at places like DSLReports.com.

Beyond that, it's business practices. Open 24/7? Dispatch repairs 24/7?

(Not the same thing, by the way. Any company can cheerfully tell you they're working on a problem on a Friday night and not roll a truck until Monday.)

Billing practices? Bandwidth caps? Throttling or cut off? Etc etc.

Generally unless the business practices or complaint level are high, the CLEC/competitor is virtually identical network-wise as the incumbents. One consideration might be local jobs vs foreign or even just out-of-state. I used a competing DSL provider for years because I knew the night staff were college kids in Ft. Collins who actually cared about having me as a customer.

FIOS and similar are a play to remove the common carrier requirements from the "last mile". PUC regulators are not requiring the RBOCs to allow competitive ISPs onto those circuits like they did copper pairs. Once you install it you'll find that the records for your copper pair will get "lost" and you'll never be able to go back to it. Pricing and "bundling" will keep you on the RBOC's fiber system, forever. Or until the regulatory winds change.

(Unlikeky because CATV kept from being turned into a common carrier also, propping up the RBOC's complaints that they "couldn't compete" when they had to open their copper networks to all ISPs.)
 
The "last mile" (which may be up to about three these days for DSL) is provided by your local phone company. Back at the local switching office is the "collocated" DSLAMs (essentially the provider DSL routers). You will find that there are frequently more companies selling DSL service than there are people who have DSLAMS at your local office. To my knowledge, there are only two at the one at the end of my street: COVAD and VERIZON. The various providers by their service through one of these two. The connection from these to the long haul may be through even other providers not related to either the person you subscribed to DSL or to the DSLAM operators.
 
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