Josh Bailey <josh@vandervecken.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 31 Oct 2000, Michael Bordignon wrote:
>
> > How many competitors are there in the US, and how long has dsl been
> > there?
>
> In California, most providers use resold PacBell pairs - and even then,
> most service providers resell Covad infrastructure (which relies upon
> PacBell pairs).
Which is to say, in most locations where DSL is available (it's by no
means universal), the regional telco owns the infrastructure, and various
providers re-sell use of this infrastructure to consumers.
Much like NZ, actually, except that in the US (AFAIK) your DSL bills
come entirely from the last reseller in the chain, rather than partly from
the consumer-facing ISP and partly from the telco, as is the case with
Jetstream.
> New Zealand's DSL offering is inferior in cost and reliability compared
> with that available internationally.
For some values of "internationally". There are a lot of places where
broadband of any flavour is still not available, and won't be for quite
some time.
I'd also note that most of the US broadband providers put fairly heavy
speed caps on their users' connections, compared to the Jetstream "all the
copper will bear" arrangement. The usual figures I see are in the 512 to
768 Kbps range for DSL -- I'm not sure what cable is like these days.
> I have had experience with incumbent DSL providers internationally that are
> able to offer reliable flat rate without "competition."
Were they also in the NZ situation of having extremely limited bandwidth
to the content most users wish to access? The DSL infrastructure is not
the primary bottleneck in NZ, at least currently -- international
connectivity is. (This may well alter when Southern Cross comes on-line,
but that hasn't happened yet...)
Judging by some horror stories I've heard about US DSL providers,
Telecom aren't too bad at the technical side of things either. They could
be better, certainly, but they could be a lot worse...
Jonathan
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Received on Tue Oct 31 12:26:13 2000