Re: OT: QWest experiences???

At 11:31 PM -0700 4/18/05, Steve Herber wrote:
>What would the ISP charges be, from oz.net, to support this new high-speed
>Qwest product?  I have been a very satisfied 256/256 Qwest/oz.net DSL
>customer for ages and have been considering a speed upgrade.  This sound
>like a real winner If the total price is not too high.


I think most independent ISPs charge about the same for access these 
days, which is to say around $20, exclusive of the DSL loop itself. 
(Pricing is typically on the ISP's website, e.g. www.oz.net in our 
case.  We don't charge more for the 1.5Mbps product; I don't think 
most others do, either.)  Typically, the big variables in pricing are 
(1) quality of customer service and (2) quality of network. 
Speakeasy, for example, has built a great business by emphasizing 
those two points and charging a reasonable premium for it.

 From my point of view, one key reason to avoid the Qwest+MSN combo 
meal is that they take ownership of your DSL line, making it 
impossible to switch ISPs without physically disconnecting the DSL 
circuit and ordering a new one.  This process can take days, and 
reportedly up to two weeks, during which time you are without access. 
By contrast, if you use an independent ISP and are not happy with the 
service, you can typically call Qwest and switch service providers 
with only a trivial amount of downtime as they swing your PVC to a 
different ISP.

Someone recently remarked that 'ATM cells are ATM cells' and implied 
that the ISP portion of the service isn't really relevant.  I need to 
clarify this point, as it is not as simple as it may appear.  First 
of all, the ISP has to choose how much bandwidth to provision to the 
downstream user on the ATM side.  It is not a flat rate service - 
ISPs are given the option (by Qwest) to buy as much or as little as 
we'd like, in 3 Mbps increments.  Likewise, the ISP you use has a 
choice of upstream transit providers, some of which are great and 
some of which are less than great.  Again, they have to make a 
business decision as to which transit providers they use, and how 
much they oversubscribe that bandwidth, as well.

Frankly, those two issues alone have as much or more to do with the 
real-world performance you'll see as the speed your DSL modem 
connects to the DSLAM at -- if the ISP is massively oversubscribed on 
either side of the network, you may not be able to get anywhere near 
the speeds you are expecting.  Other ISP-related issues such as DNS 
server performance and local content caching (e.g. Akamai) can also 
make a big difference in terms of your actual experience.

Consider the cable modem scenario, where the network is massively 
oversubscribed, the ISP has zero incentive to improve it (because 
there is no meaningful competition in many of those markets), and the 
connection itself is shared amongst hundreds of users, any one of 
whom can effectively monopolize it if they behave badly.  This is why 
the advertising by Comcast and others is so terribly misleading - 
they imply that DSL is slower, but fail to footnote the fact that the 
maximum possible speeds they are promoting are not ones you will 
receive at the times you want them most.

-- Jared

-- 
Jared B. Reimer <[email protected]>
The River Internet Access Co.
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