At 09:43 AM 1/20/97 -0500, Nurdane Oksas wrote:
Does anyone use ADSL lines? or are they still very expensive?
They're not widely available yet; I don't know if any of the (US) phone companies offer it as more than trials. One limitation is that the technology works over copper wire, so it has to be offered at your local telco wire center. Of course, your local telco has to have something useful to do with the bits once the user sends them to the telco, and has to have some useful bits to send the user. This means they've got to haggle about standards for 5 more years (or just do the right thing and deploy IP, with some respectable bandwidth to the outside world) (or deploy ATM to get a layer 2 connection to something outside.)
That was the intent of at least one sectio of the recently enacted Telecom Reform Act, but now the Baby Bells are trying to block local access provisions in the SC which would allow, for example, ISP to offer ISDN/ADSL/HDSL via their own CO equipment (bypassing the telco switches).
Don't know if the telcos have a clue about pricing, either. It's obviously got to be more than cost, but they'll probably thrash around a lot the way they did with IP....
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