Where: big city, central financial district.
>
> Why: I make a _lot_ of calls during busy hours, into similarly congested
> areas. Almost all of them inter-LATA.
I dunno. I've worked in cities for many years and never had more than an intermittent problem (probably my own dialing error) calling within the central business district or long distance to other city centers.
Now, I've worked in places with inadequate PBX service, but that was the result of the administration not providing for adequate capacity (subsequent fixed).
Ignoring the labor cost, you have a point. unfortunately, labor _is_
> a big, and *ever-rising* part of the total cost picture.
I dare say if you found out the number of baby-Bell employees per line at Jan 1 1984 and today, I dare say you'd find far less people per line than in the past. Stuff is far more automated, both what the subscriber sees and what is done behind the scenes. Likewise with the long distance carriers. (DSL makes it tricky, since that's essentially two lines per subscriber given on a single line. Computer geeks used to have a separate line for their PC, now they use DSL.)
Where available, cable broadband leaves DSL in the dust.
***** Moderator's Note *****
Cable is not all sunshine and flowers: I have been using Comcast for almost a year now, and I've been very disappointed with the Internet and the telephone service.
I've been getting frequent DNS failures, and the ssh connections I used to access the digest often "stall" for as much as a minute, with no warning. I couldn't upload pictures to Ebay when I tried to sell something recently: the Ebay error code indicated they were being corrupted in transit.
I used to use Speakeasy DSL, and was very pleased both with the speed and the service. When the Comcast "Triple Play" trial is over in February, I'm going back to them, since I never had any of the problems I've seen with Comcast when I was on Speakeasy.
DSL may be 'slower' - but that bandwidth is all yours, all the way back to the switchroom, all the time. And it's reasonably secure, nobody's sniffing packets on DSL like they can on the Cable "party line" looking for unencrypted juicy data.
And it's a lot easier for the Telco or ISP to add extra bandwidth at the Telco switchroom when the backhaul T-1 to the Internet gets overloaded, than it is for the CableCo to roll trucks and physically reconfigure the TV cable system with new trunk cables PLUS add more equipment and bandwidth at the head-end.
With cable broadband you have the problem where the cable segment gets overloaded and they won't split them - cable Internet is like old coax thin-net, it's a party line. Too many parties try using the system at once, and the entire system breaks down.
Cable Broadband operators have discovered Net Non-Neutrality, and have been caught deploying various "bandwidth conservation schemes" (IE they surreptitiously break it) so that other network traffic (things like Bit-Torrent file sharing) doesn't overwhelm the IP traffic that they want to sell you, like VOIP and Video On Demand.
Bill: Would that perhaps explain your DNS failures and ssh connection stalls and picture corruption, hmmmmm? ;-)
Remember Microsoft's old MS-DOS development credo: "The job's not done till Lotus won't run." They would change the undocumented calls so outside software suddenly stopped working after a point revision, then try to sell you the competing Microsoft application software that was "guaranteed to work perfectly with our OS."
The CableCo's and ILEC's are poised to take that to the next level, unless you want to pay more for their "premium access services"...
The point of contention is moved away from you to the telco switch room where you're all on the same DSLAM, like a Lucent Stinger or similar. You still have bandwidth issues.
I understand that cable uses what in essence is Ethernet. But they do have traffic provisioning built into some of the nodes since they run both commerical and residential over the same coax.
Tell me about it. Cox had to upgrade all the amplifiers in their coaxial network in order to offer 20/2 service. The contractor they hired to do the job didn't turn on the temperature control L-Pads which caused no end of trouble.
But their backbone is fiber, at least here in Rhode Island.
Interestingly Cox used to suffer from frequent DNS failuers but over the past year or so that's gotten much better. But all the stories I've heard from friends with Comcast in both Massachusetts and Georgia make me want to steer far clear of them.
Yes. In many cases, it's ATM backhaul from the DSLAM to the appropriate session terminating device (if PPPoE), then the upstream bandwidth from that to the Internet at large. Oversubscription on that backhaul is common, especially if it's a third party ISP buying access from a ILEC or CLEC that is providing the DSLAM access. AT&T DSL backhaul is
*expensive*, for example. At the same time, it's also good business sense to oversubscribe, not all customers will be pulling their line speeds all at once. It's when the oversubscription gets out of hand that problems get noticed.
DOCSIS has provided Quality of Service (QoS) facilities since DOCSIS
1.1, and is very capable. My WideOpenWest voice service via their cable modem is indistinguisable from the POTS service I had before, with the exception of better customer service and the lack of pulse dialing (though that is curable in other ways).
As for the Assuming a DSL system and a cable modem system of proper provisioning with no contention issues on the backhaul, during peak times, from a latency perspective, DSL will beat the cable modem. This is due to the TDMA (or CDMA) access of the modem on a common channel in a given neighborhood. If there's not enough timeslots there for your modem to inject data into, you're going to get latency. That's where DSL wins. It's not the bandwidth, it's the latency. Especially when you *do* figure the QoS needed for Voice-over-IP-over-DOCSIS, and that timeslots for *that* have to be reserved down there at layer1/2/3.
I will also note that with the advent of remote terminals and the widespread use thereof (oh, for the past 8+ years now), that even though they're fiber connected, upgrading those when they have capacity issues presents the *same* problems that the coax providers have when a neighborhood has capacity issues. RTs with remote DSLAMs are a fact of life, at least in AT&T territory.
ObOpinion: At least Verizon and others got things right when they decided to pull fiber cable to the customer premises with FIOS.
It really feels like the OP's general information is several years out of date.
Many ISPs have overloaded DNS servers. I run my own caching recursive lookup server on my firewall at home. Easier that way.
I have a few to contribute regarding Comcast in MI as well. All I'm going to generally say is that if one has alternative cable or DSL provisioning in your area, one should look into using them.
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