Bull.
> It's a marketing issue. It's a monopolistic
> big-telco-doing-whatever-they-want-to issue. There is no technological
> requirement for there to be a dialtone on the same line as DSL, and
> no, I'm not talking about SDSL, I'm talking about ADSL which usually
> must be bundled with POTS service.
Sigh. While I'm no fan of SBC or any of the others, not everything is the fault of the big old telco you know ...
In the case of DSL, someone has to cover the costs of maintaining the wire and doing the billing. When DSL was first rolled out, it was promoted as an add-on to voice phone service. The independent DSL providers (and eventually the telcos themselves) successfully argued to the various state PUCs that they should only have to pay the marginal or addon cost to put DSL on the line, since the subscriber was already covering billing and maintenance through the voice bill.
Tariffs, regulations and accounting systems were written by the sates and the telcos to make this happen.
Now, the DSL providers want to sell a naked product. Well, all those laws/systems/regulations have to change. In fact, in many cases the telco doesn't even know what it costs on an individual basis for a naked line - they've never had to compute it that way before or track costs that way before. Far easier to add it all up and divide by the number of subscriber lines, eh?
While there is no technological reason to prevent naked DSL from being sold, you clearly don't grasp all the other factors that take time and money to change. While the telcos may not like sharing their old copper pairs, they've pretty much resigned themselves to it, since they were installed under regulated rate of return rules.
What's a bit more unfortunate is that the telcos have successfully managed to exempt themselves from sharing any new fiber that gets buried. Since the capacity of fiber exceeds that of a copper pair in a bundle with a bunch of other copper pairs by a factor of a million to
1 or more, the long term viability of naked DSL is questionable at best.