We are part of the Bell Atlantic ADSL trial in Northern VA - basically BA has 6 CO's with terminating ADSL modems. This is aggregated onto a FDDI ring between each CO on cisco's. One of the CO's has a port into the BA SMDS cloud which is the interconnect with participating ISP's who also have a port on the SMDS cloud. So basically, packetize the data as early as possible to get the 20x plus economies of scale vs hauling channelized circuits.
Of course, this is orthogonal to xDSL; the same economies of scale would apply with T-1 local loops. Seems to me that for the RBOCs, the big disadvantage of xDSL is losing all those fat, high-margin T-1 local loop fees. The advantage is getting a shot at taking over the Internet business. Jim Shankland Flying Fox Computer Systems, Inc.