RE: OT: QWest experiences???

That is great information, Jared.  I wonder if anyone has published a table
of the capabilities of various good, local ISP's, such as Oz, Blarg,
Drizzle, Zipcon, 2Alpha and others.  Would Oz be willing to share that
information?  Another aspect that I have wondered about is where the servers
are kept. and what the backup, redundancy, UPS, etc. situation is.  Does the
hardware usually reside in some hosting service somewhere?  There is a tier
of ISP's, such as (I think) SeaNET, Olympus, etc. who charge more than the
average, and the only rationale that I see is that they may have
"industrial-strength" facilities, at least some of whose aspects could be
more important for businesses that can't afford ANY outages (at least ones
that don't take down their competition as well).

It has been my experience that ISP's DO charge more for higher speed
connections, with the exception of NWNet, which charges by the bit, so they
really have incentive for you to use as much bandwidth as possible.  For
instance, Blarg:

	http://www.blarg.net/QwestSOHOxlDSLServices

Note that they also ding you more if you want to run servers, which is
aggravating since it seems that this only requires 30 seconds at the
keyboard to unblock a port or several.

Here is Zipcon:

	http://www.zipcon.net/dsl.html

And here is Drizzle:

	http://www.drizzle.com/dsl/dsl6.html

If Oz charges flat rate, that is really good news.  But it seems that you
don't offer, or at least advertise, the variety of services that Blarg and
others charge different prices for, and your New Edge connections certainly
vary in price as a function of speed:

	http://info.theriver.com/services/dsl.html


By the way, what is the implication of "Pro" services.  Is that linked to
Qwest's "Pro" service, and what does this buy for you?  "Guaranteed"
bandwidth?  Faster repair service?  Ego-stroking?

Although I have great distain for Comcast in general, it seems to me that
the definition of "ADSL" is that, "...we don't promise anything", so granted
that what you say about loops is true, maybe it's not much different with
Qwest or any of the others offering ADSL, where it may be the broken-down
plant, rather than the traffic, that limits you, but you still have no right
to having it fixed.

Ken Meyer


-----Original Message-----

From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]]On Behalf Of Jared B. Reimer
Sent: Tuesday, April 19, 2005 6:24 AM
To: Steve Herber
Cc: SeattleWireless Talk List

Subject: 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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