>no wise man would disagree with Howard ;-)
>
>I agree that there is no financial incentive for Cisco to implement PPPOE
>support for home/SOHO and I'm sure the carriers who sell other services
>aimed at let's say, branch offices, are more than happy with the
>shortcomings of DSL. Cisco does have a product line that targets places like
>realty, law, automotive (mom & pop) or other small business that require
>only sporadic dialup use from more than one PC and now we see PPPOE client
>side support for 1600 and 1700 models.
As an aside, and unfortunately I can't get into the specific
networks, I have seen situations where PPPoE has scalability issues
in large access networks, and where L2TP may be a better long-term
solution.
>I'm confident that this base is not a
>major source of revenue, and I am sure there are businesses that need to
>keep their overhead as low as possible for which DSL could be an attractive
>compromise that vastly out performs dialup. Availability aside, there are
>very attractive business packages where one wouldn't need to feel guilty
>about trying to swindle a residential account for business use ;-), which
>you may not be able to get in a "proper" place of business anyway.
Any ethical issues aside, just be aware that the carriers are getting
more and more proactive about detecting violations of the terms of
service they define, and shutting down customers that violate them.
You have to make a case-by-case decision if that risk is acceptable
to the business.
That's not to say that Cisco has never deployed features that go
around carrier business models. I've heard several developers
mention that the X25 PVC parameter, which allows parallel VCs to be
established to circumvent a maximum window size limitations, was
introduced to get around the restrictions of the French PTT.
>Although
>I live in Germany, I am American (and, BTW, will return shortly) and DSL is
>sh*t hot over here. I've had it for almost a year and the first 6 months
>there were one or two 1-12 hour outages a month and now I can't remember any
>outages in the last couple months at all. I was also over here during the
>big ISDN rollout in the early 90's and they really got that right, you can
>live on a farm miles from town and still get ISDN. We use DSL at work for an
>office that requires additional bandwidth and needless to say there was a
>problem right after installation. The tech showed up the next day and I made
>a joke about if this was my home installation I would still be waiting for
>the callback and he joked back that we don't screw around with our business
>customers. Yes, Germany pretty much has a telephony monopoly (even though
>there are now competitors), but that's a whole different conversation I
>won't get into here...
When the German Vodaphone cellular company took over several British
cellular companies, there were industry rumors that the new sales
slogan would be "Vee haff ways of making you talk."
>back on topic: I still think it would be a proactive
>move on Cisco's part to integrate PPPOE support in the models that are
>specifically targeted at SOHO and even those at the branch office level. Why
>wait for an increased demand IF (and only if) the implementation would/could
>be fairly straightforward (it may not be, I'm no programmer). Possibly this
>is a litmus test and will propagate to the 2500s. I of course want it solely
>for selfish, personal at home use ;-) Doesn't everyone have at least a
>couple of 2500s at home?? (that was a JOKE).
>
>I kinda think Cisco might be experimenting in this arena anyway (the home
>perspective):
>
>Cisco Announces Program to Connect with Homebuilders
>Cisco's Connected Communities program helps developers integrate the
>Internet Lifestyle into master planned communities
>
>http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/corp_020901.html
Right. But there's a key word here: planned. The DSL provider(s)
initially in those communities is cooperating in the business model,
and they are going to offer services that give customers what they
want at a price they can afford to support. There will be economies
of scale.
It's no secret that the DSL wholesaler market in the US is having
terrible financial problems, along with the ISPs whose service is
primarily via DSL. Part of that problem is that the services were
priced based on an assumption that the level of customer support
required would be comparable to that of a single dialup user (at
least for single ADSL modem accounts). When the use of the DSL
connection gets more and more critical, the waiting times for service
and/or the cost of support have been escalating.
My home office connectivity uses 768 Kbps SDSL to a provider-supplied
router. I've had terrible problems both with downtime in the DSL
proper/ISP router interconnect, and with failures of such things as
netnews. Executives of my DSL ISP have said, quite frankly, that
there are several things getting in the way of service (e.g., over a
day of waiting even to get first-line support on the pbone). Even
though they positioned SDSL as "business grade," their margins on
support are much lower than on frame/T1. In addition, the local
telco only guarantees 24 hours before starting to work on a DSL loop
problem, where they will guarantee 4 hours for frame relay or T1.
_________________________________
FAQ, list archives, and subscription info: http://www.groupstudy.com/list/cisco.html
Report misconduct and Nondisclosure violations to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
