Re: [PLUG] Business DSL reccomendation?

["William H. Magill" <magill@mcgillsociety.org>]

On Monday, November 11, 2002, at 11:50 PM, Arthur S. Alexion wrote:
> With telephones, it was always that the business customers were
> subsidizing cheap residential phone service for all.  I suspect that is
> the unspoken philosophy behind business broadband pricing.

This was the case until Judge Green declared it unconstitutional....

However, it WAS the policy which gave us universal telephone service. 
If people outside the central cities (including most suburbs) had to 
pay the actual cost of their telephone service, as many in rural areas 
now do, they would think twice about it.

Today, however, businesses pay considerably less for communications 
services than residential customers. [Remember telephone bills today, 
especially commercial lines, are based on actual usage.] They are the 
ones who have had their bills reduced dramatically in size, not the 
rest of us. The technique is called "skimming the cream" and it is what 
has made the number of CLECs dwindle dramatically in recent years -- 
the cream is virtually gone.

In the data business, connections provided for commercial purposes are 
engineered differently. (Or at least that is the theory). The 
topologies for aggregating lines and therefore the number and location 
of routers and the like are different to deal with the increased 
bandwidth demands.

Similarly, "residential" ($49) ADSL is usually "low speed" --  768K x 
128K whereas, business xDSL normally starts at 1.5Meg X 768K. ... which 
it turns out is priced almost the same for business and residential.

There is also a direct relationship to the still remaining PUC 
regulated telephone tariffs... such as the one which says "you can't 
have residential service for your business." (Which does hark back to 
the old subsidy business.)

My residential DCAnet DSL is 1.5meg x 380K (what Bell Atlantic used to 
call their "professional" service, and it costs me $110 per month.

_________________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia Linux Users Group        --       http://www.phillylinux.org
Announcements - http://lists.netisland.net/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce
General Discussion  --   http://lists.netisland.net/mailman/listinfo/plug