On Sun, Aug 07, 2011 at 09:45:31PM -0400, Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote:
On Sun, 07 Aug 2011 20:47:48 EDT, Randy Carpenter said:
Does AT&T seriously serve the entire state of Indiana from a single POP??? Sounds crazy to me.
It makes sense if they're managing to bill customers by the cable mile from their location to the POP. Imagine a POP in Terre Haute or Indianapolis and 1,500+ customers in the Gary area and another 1K in the South Bend and Fort Wayne areas... Of course, some other provider would get a clue and and offer the same price per mile "your location to our POP" - after putting a POP in Gary, South Bend, and Fort Wayne. :)
AT&T doesn't serve the entire state of Indiana from a single POP. The question at hand was how many POPs *with layer 3 service* they had. I don't know the answer to that question and don't claim that it is or is not "one", but the TDM or L2 backhaul from the nearest POP to whatever other POP has the Layer 3 service isn't paid for by the customer. It's also not clear if they were talking about AT&T the LEC (offering services like DSL) or AT&T the IXC (offering things like business Internet service, V4VPN services, etc). If the latter, it's not at all surprising; legacy IXCs often have more POPs than POPs w/ Layer 3 services, and they backhaul L3 services over their legacy TDM and/or Layer 2 (ATM or FR) networks to a POP that has a router. This was a way for them to get IP service everywhere without installing routers everywhere; as the service took off, more POPs could be IP enabled to reduce the about of TDM (etc.) backhaul. But large legacy IXCs have a lot of POPs and, in general, still don't have routers (customer facing routers, anyway) in all of them. -- Brett