[NTLUG:Discuss] DSL in The Colony, and Southwestern Bell

[juice@airmail.net]

"Gorwood, Steve" <sgorwood at ti.com> said:

> Are you using PPPoE?
> 
>     NO.  I have an external DSL modem talking to my ethernet card.
> 
> Do you have to authenticate to the SWB network?
> 
>     Only for newsgroups.

I doubt you are authenticating to swb. Your news server is connected via IP 
and is probably reachable from other parts of the internet which would require 
you to authenticate to it. Don't you have to authenticate to your mail server 
too?

PPPoE should be transparent beyond the card/box the ethernet cable sticks 
into. Except for the rain storm effect, you should be able to treat your isp 
as conneted via an amazingly long ethernet cable. 

The person with the rain storm effect should open a trouble ticket with their 
telco with the need of modem reset after each rain as the problem.

There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding about what dsl is and is not. No 
biggie. I feel it will be eaisier to compare dsl to a few others.

DSL
1.you don't authenticate to your telco; they know where and who you are
2.don't authenticate to isp; telco does it for you in creating virtual circuit
3.info goes over a copper pair/digital protocol that can handle ~ 1.5mb/s[1]
4.telco sets up virtual pathway that can't be changed from session to session
5.circuit is considered up and open all the time
6.residential low priority service
7.a preset amount of the bandwidth is given to traffic in a given direction
8.data may be discarded before it reaches the far end and there really isn't
  a guarantee on how long it takes to get there.


POTS
1.you don't authenticate to your telco; they know where and who you are
2.will auth to isp whether or not you share destination phone# with others
3.info goes over a copper pair/analog protocol that can handle about 64kb/s
4.telco allows changes to destination from session to session
5.circuit is createed on the fly and up only during the "call"
6.residential low priority service
7.~8kbs is kept by telco for their overhead. the rest can be traffic in either
  direction
8.data is supposed to reach the far end even if it takes a while to get there


T1
1.you don't authenticate to your telco; they know where and who you are
2.you don't authenticate to your isp; they know where and who you are
3.info goes over a copper pair/digital protocol that can handle about 1.5mb/s
4.telco sets up virtual pathway that can't be changed from session to session
5.circuit is considered up and open all the time
6.business high priority service
7.the percentage of traffic in each direction can vary and is all yours
8.data isn't supposed to share bandwidth with the rest of the telco network
  so there shouldn't be a reason for loss or delay


ISDN
1.you don't authenticate to your telco; they know where and who you are
2.will auth to isp whether or not you share destination phone# with others
3.info goes over a copper pair/analog protocol that can handle ~ 144kbs[3]
4.telco allows changes to destination from session to session
5.circuit is createed on the fly and up only during the "call"
6.buseness high priority service[2]
7.the percentage of traffic in each direction can vary within channel
8.bandwidth isn't gauranteed until circuit is established but is supposed to
  get there and in a timely manner once circuit is up

[1] mega bits per second - traditionally a capital B is used for bytes.
[2] residential isdn was something the telcos (swb) didn't want to happen.
[3] isdn is sold in sets 2 channels of 64kbs each; + 16kbs overhead channel
[4] what happens logically to a circuit doesn't mean that's the way it is
    treated under the hood.

For dsl the telco guarantees the maximum bandwidth they will allow upto for 
said price. The minimum bandwidth the telco gauantees is alot lower than many 
expect, as low as 10kbs or none if you read the contract right. Swb will 
acknowledge that 10kbs is bad and work a trouble ticket on that kind of 
throughput, they're just covering their backside. You should read between the 
lines on the insurance they offer for your house wiring.

Some isp's gaurantee their bandwidth like the telcos, the most they will give 
you without stating the minimum. The last I heard August counted the bits and 
charged after a certain point, could have changed. I don't know their 
bandwidth gaurantees. Hex.net used to be popular but I heard they got sold and 
aren't as good. Ia at http://www.airmail.net/products/dsl.html cost 10, 20 or 
40 $ depending on the mimimum bandwidth you want them to cut off at. Be sure 
that the minimum you buy is <= the max your telco rates your line. Before the 
telco network got waited down (hope you don't live in Plano) people were 
getting upto the rating on their phone line from a lower cost account.

Along with packet of dsl data traveling the atm or frame cloud (depending on 
the telco) is a red, yellow or green tag. I hope I get this next part right. 
If you've used up your minimum for this time slot a packet goes out yellow and 
may be reclassed down if the next invisible hop in the cloud is overloaded. If 
a node is really overloaded, red packets are the first packets for discarding.
The description i got was more complicated than that.

All that research and I'll have to move to get dsl. Anybody hear anything 
about ricochet?