[plug] adsl opinions

[Martin]

$author = "Luke Dudney" ;
> 
> Not necessarily.
> ADSL is continually touted by Telstra as a "best effort" service. If 
> you've ever dealt with Telstra you can imagine what "best effort" means 
> to them.
> ISDN on the other hand is a guaranteed service.

...and you will pay thru the nose to get it. telstra has a lot of investment
in ISDN and is not ready to see it go away just yet. problem is that they
have always overcharged for it and continue to do so, thus spelling the
beginning of the end for a technology that still has a place in the market.

DSL on the other hand has some decent competition in the marketplace (at
least in most metro/urban areas) and hence the services being provided are
priced competitively. DSL is also scalable without necessarily changing the
physical plant that it runs over. i could go on but the take up of DSL
speaks for itself after the relative failure of cable and satellite...


> This is all based on Telstra's offering. I have had no experience with 
> Optus's or heard of the services you've described here, so I can't say 
> if the same will be true for those.

all alternative DSL networks (optus, request, there are others which escape
my memory right now) that i have had the pleasure of working with had
downtimes measured in minutes (not hours or days) over many months and was
usually related to something else breaking rather then any component of the
DSL (copper pair, modem, dslam, authentication server). telstra on the other
hand, well where do we start? :*P

marty

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