On Tue, 31 Oct 2000, Jonathan Santaana wrote:

> Which is to say, in most locations where DSL is available (it's by no
> means universal),

Exactly. I made no claim of universality. I do make the claim that the NZ
offering is inferior.

> Much like NZ, actually, except that in the US (AFAIK) your DSL bills
> come entirely from the last reseller in the chain,

Not necessarily. Some business providers here bill seperately for
value-added management/VPN services.

> broadband of any flavour is still not available, and won't be for quite
> some time.

Certainly. However, this is not relevant to my point - that the service as
a whole is inferior to what I expect (and obtain) internationally.

> 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.

PacBell let you choose between 384Kbp/s and 1.5Mb/s. These are minimums -
not caps. AT&T broadband is limited to 128Kb/s.

> Were they also in the NZ situation of having extremely limited bandwidth
> to the content most users wish to access?

Yes.

> 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...

IME, US providers have had their problems. My provider certainly hasn't
been perfect. But even taking their problems into account, NZ's offering
is still inferior.

--
Josh Bailey (josh@vandervecken.com - Berkeley CA, USA)
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