On Mon, October 8, 2007 1:06 pm, Roland Perry wrote:
Surely the incumbent doesn't impose a cost on the bandwidth along the local loop - the bottleneck (and cost per gigabyte) is the backhaul from their locally operated DSLAM to the ISP's own network.
If you're buying wholesale from the incumbent, it's effectively the same thing, as there's some kind of L2 connection per subscriber back to your own network, so no possibility to talk to other local subscribers without the hairpin. (At least, I've yet to see such a thing in the offering from any European incumbent. I guess you could in theory with a virtual-router or VRF per ISP on the incumbent's kit at the exchange, but that brings other problems when you want to do things beyond basic Internet, e.g. VPN or pseudowire services.) Unbundling does change the model - renting just the metal path from BT is not actually *that* horrific - but you then have to factor in your own kit in the exchange. That's not just cost, there's a big logistics piece - and a lot of processes to change if you've built your business around wholesale. Regards, Tim.