Educate me: are you not at this time billing the customer for the local loop? Here in VZ territory, the cost of the local loop lease from VZ and the DSLAM access from Covad (in your case, SBC provides both of these, right?) are both rolled into the standard monthly fee from my ISP. Is this not how it's done in SBC land? -C

opportunity to also sell other services over that DSL circuit, and we are also made responsible for billing the DSL circuit to the customer. So in

-- --------------------------- Christopher A. Woodfield rekoil@semihuman.com PGP Public Key: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xB887618B

I can't speak for Bruce's situation, but in San Jose, if you're using a competitive ISP, (e.g., not the SBC/PBI inhouse ISP arm), you get two bills. a bill from your ISP for "internet access", and a fee rolled onto the bill of the POTS line the DSL is a "Service" on. D At 2:36 PM -0400 6/25/01, Christopher A. Woodfield wrote:

Educate me: are you not at this time billing the customer for the local loop? Here in VZ territory, the cost of the local loop lease from VZ and the DSLAM access from Covad (in your case, SBC provides both of these, right?) are both rolled into the standard monthly fee from my ISP. Is this not how it's done in SBC land?

-C

...

opportunity to also sell other services over that DSL circuit, and we are also made responsible for billing the DSL circuit to the customer. So in

-- +---------------------+-----------------------------------------+ | dredd@megacity.org | "Conan! What is best in life?" | | Derek J. Balling | "To crush your enemies, see them | | | driven before you, and to hear the | | | lamentation of their women!" | +---------------------+-----------------------------------------+

You're right, but what can I do? I will lose my customers if they are forced to switch to PPPoE. So SBC wins either way. As the article mentions, this will likely end up in a courtroom somewhere.

At 11:23 AM -0700 6/25/01, Bruce Robertson wrote:

...

So the upshot is that I won't sign a contract that forces me to do something impossible, and certainly against by business interests.

... so then your contract expires, and only SBC remains.

This hurts SBC precisely how, again?

Not faulting you, in fact I applaud your stance, but let's not harbor any delusions that your stance will do anything but benefit SBC. The more people who end their SBC contracts that way, the more DSL customers are suddenly beached looking for a quick reinstall, something you can bet SBC will be poised to provide.

D

-- +---------------------+-----------------------------------------+ | dredd@megacity.org | "Conan! What is best in life?" | | Derek J. Balling | "To crush your enemies, see them | | | driven before you, and to hear the | | | lamentation of their women!" | +---------------------+-----------------------------------------+

-- Bruce Robertson, President/CEO +1-775-348-7299 Great Basin Internet Services, Inc. fax: +1-775-348-9412 For PGP key: finger bruce@greatbasin.net

At 2:49 PM -0400 6/25/01, Jeff Mcadams wrote:

...

This hurts SBC precisely how, again?

It hurts them big time when the state Utilities Commission looks at the situation and starts asking why on earth all of these ISPs are suddenly exiting the DSL marketplace. It will particularly hurt them if one or more of the ISPs files a formal complaint with the Utility Commission.

Hahahahahaha... you've obviously never dealt with the California PUC. A more useless group more firmly in the pockets of the utilities themselves I have never seen. D -- +---------------------+-----------------------------------------+ | dredd@megacity.org | "Conan! What is best in life?" | | Derek J. Balling | "To crush your enemies, see them | | | driven before you, and to hear the | | | lamentation of their women!" | +---------------------+-----------------------------------------+

At 6:20 PM -0800 6/25/01, Dee McKinney wrote:

I've never dealt with the California PUC yet....but in Alaska, it's called the RCA, for Regulatory Commision of Alaska, and has challenged the term "clueless". I'm wondering if there are any PUC commision members with any real understanding ?

Yes. There are some midwest states who do (or at least, "did" when I worked for GTE TelOps) ... they proceeded from the principle of "If a PUC person is dealing with this, whether $COMPLAINANT is right or wrong, $UTILITY is paying us $SOME_HOURLY_RATE for the clerk's time in dealing with it"... GTE has (or at least had) a "cash buyout" that reps were capable of giving (at the time, it was up to $500, with $1000 on supervisor approval) ... so obviously the hourly "fine/rate" even for claims where the utility was "right" was high enough to justify such. :) D -- +---------------------+-----------------------------------------+ | dredd@megacity.org | "Conan! What is best in life?" | | Derek J. Balling | "To crush your enemies, see them | | | driven before you, and to hear the | | | lamentation of their women!" | +---------------------+-----------------------------------------+

On Mon, 25 Jun 2001, Chris Adams wrote:

Once upon a time, Christopher A. Woodfield <rekoil@semihuman.com> said:

...

If I'm reading this correctly, SBC is forcing ISPs that resell SBC's DSL access to go with PPPoE over ATM, thus potentially forcing businesses to buy DSL net access from SBC directly.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see how PPPoA forces businesses to buy DSL elsewhere.

If you've currently got a pvc mapped to each customer, and then that capability is taken away, you will have problems if your "enhanced" offering doesn't play well with PPPoE. There's a number of negatives for the ISP, and few positives: -Billing for the DSL pipe (not IP) is moved from the customer's phone bill to the ISP. Have to rework your billing system, assume collections, etc. -PPPoE is not inherently evil, but some solutions work better without it. Perhaps some people are selling an ADSL 'small business package' and they've placed a small ethernet-ethernet router and/or firewall between the ADSL bridge and the customer's LAN. The ISP then needs to ditch that (possibly pricey) equipment and put something in that support PPPoE. Multiply by the number of customers... $$$$ -SBC controls the Redback or whatever they are using for PPPoE aggregation. That means that if SBC does not manage it well (too many people, bad sw load, frequent 'maintenance'), you lose any performance/reliability advantage you had. I put more trust in the ATM switches 'just working' than I put in the PPPoE aggregator 'just working'. This advantage may be how you cost-justify your services to your customers. Lose the advantage, lose the customer. -SBC may choose to offer features on the PPPoE aggregator to themselves before they let you have it. They may impose limits on what you can do as far as number of simultaneous connections/pcs that again clash with your current offering. The list goes on... Charles

-- Chris Adams <cmadams@hiwaay.net> Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.