The only thing I can figure is that the morons in question are going to quote, for legal purposes, "peak" or "burst" bandwidth, ...
Well, sure. Let's have a show of hands: today, who gets 53Kbits/sec throughput on an X56 dialup? Who gets 1.544Mbit/sec throughput on a T1? Hmmn, looks pretty quiet out there. Everyone's overcommitted, nobody can provide full pipe bandwidth on the connections they're selling now. This isn't news. It's also true that customers are going to get crabby if there isn't a lot of local bits that they can get to with their spiffy ADSL connection, but the telcos may have a small clue. There's an ADSL trial down the road in Ithaca which is very successful, and one of the big reasons is that the users for the most part are connecting to Cornell University which has both more internal and external bandwidth than most continents. I talked to the local Time-Warner guy, who agrees that when they install Roadrunner, they'll get a connection to Cornell as well (which won't be hard, since Cornell is talking to them now about buying bandwidth to connect up around town.) I suspect that the real market for xDSL will be as much telecommuting as web surfing, and so long as the telecommuters have a fast enough connection to the office which will probably not be very far away, that's all they care about. -- John R. Levine, IECC, POB 727, Trumansburg NY 14886 +1 607 387 6869 johnl@iecc.com, Village Trustee and Sewer Commissioner, http://iecc.com/johnl, Finger for PGP key, f'print = 3A 5B D0 3F D9 A0 6A A4 2D AC 1E 9E A6 36 A3 47