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In another article in this newsletter, we discuss
the many standards involved in delivering
DSL services and their role in achieving the increasingly-important goal
of multivendor interoperability. In order to understand the capabilities
and standards support you need in your DSL offering, it is important to
understand which combinations of standards your customer community requires,
initially and in the foreseeable future. These desires will come from
factors such as:
- Their new PCs have built-in DSL modems (now offered
by Compaq).
- They want to have more than one PC on-line at a time.
- They want to have traffic for different applications
(e.g., streaming video versus email) given different priority on the
line.
There is also the matter of which combinations of standards
the ISP(s) will support. Does the DSL equipment you are considering provide
an easy marriage of those user and ISP requirements? In many cases, what
starts out as a simple DSL service offering requires extra equipment,
such as an ATMcapable router, to make everything work together. There
is also a good chance that some changes will have to be made in the cable
plant in order to make the service available to important customer groups.
(top, next column)
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With
this information in hand, you need to decide whether you will offer just
one or two distinct services, e.g., G.lite for residential and 768 Kbps
SDSL for business, or if you will offer a wider selection of speeds and
features. Some additional factors that will influence this decision will
be:
- Will this service come under NECA rules, and what
limits does that place on what you can offer?
- Is there competition from cable modems or the threat
of a CLEC entering the market? What do they offer and what do they charge?
- Will you be retailing the service to the end-user,
or wholesaling it to the ISPs for them to resell to their customers?
How many ISPs? How will installation and technical support responsibilities
be divided?
- Where does the customer obtain the CPE? Will it be
purchased or rented? Will it be just a modem, or will there be options
for including routing and security features?
- Offering a range of speeds probably will allow you
to have a larger service area, with only the lower speed services available
to customers beyond the range that a single-speed compromise offering
would cover.
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