On 2009-10-11, at 19:22 , Joe Greco wrote:
(*) In the late 1990's, I heard the most astonishing claims made by a new entrant into the Milwaukee ISP market, about how some of the "other" ISP's "shared" lines between customers and this decreased your speeds. They had no clue who I was, so I engaged their technical person for a while who set out to convince me that other ISP's really _did_ do this mythical line- sharing - multiple modems to one port. Until I started talking about the technical aspects, that is.
Not so mythical. Around the same time period, we found out about an ISP offering always-on ISDN BRI service for such a low price that it could not possibly make sense. We wondered how they could make ends meet at that rate until we found out how they did it. They daisy chained multiple customers' BRI lines together, using the second B channel from one customer to connect the next customer down the line. Once, one of their customers switched to our service and we reconfigured their router (a legitimate action: both router and BRI line belonged to the customer). Who knows how many downstream customers we broke by doing that. -Phil