Frank Bulk - iName.com <frnkblk@iname.com> wrote:

It's being done by Actelis, Hatteras, and Zhone. More exactly SHDSL or ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ similar variants. The market is being well-served. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The highlighted sentence is precisely the difference between what they are doing and what I am doing. The SHDSL folks seem to live in some kind of fantasy world where they think that all major network operators are going to throw out all their SDSL/2B1Q infrastructure and install SHDSL DSLAMs across the country instead. My SDSL work on the other hand is oriented toward working with the existing SDSL/2B1Q infrastructure massily deployed across USA by networks like Covad and what used to be DSL.net (now part of MegaPath). My Open SDSL Connectivity Project has successfully reverse-engineered the proprietary SDSL/2B1Q flavors used by the DSLAM brands deployed by the two networks named above, and I want to build bonded SDSL CPE for those flavors/networks. And yes, I have already had discussions with some people at both of the named companies. It wasn't even necessary for me to initiate contact with them as both of them have sought my open source project out and contacted me on their own about this very idea of SDSL bonding. However, despite lots of excited talk, both dialogues have ended with a mutter. Apparently there is some kind of wall of arrogance that prevents those folks from even considering getting their CPE from a mosquito like me, even though I can deliver it for one-tenth to one-hundredth of what the big vendors would want for the same thing if they would even consider building such - those big vendors have plenty of their own arrogance! Therefore, my next angle of approach is to see if there are any ISPs who go through Covad or through MegaPath's ex-DSL.net component as their Layer 2 transport (I know that at least in Covad's case there is a huge number of ISPs large and small who do that) and who want bonded SDSL badly enough to punch through that wall of arrogance. If you are an ISP who rents Layer 2 transport from Covad and I were to supply you the CPE, I think you should be able to serve bonded SDSL to your customers without having to beg Covad to descend from the heavens and give that service its blessing. Just order 2 (or 3 or 4 or however many loops you want to bond) ATM transport pipes from Covad terminating at your customer's address on one end and at your DS3/ATM interconnection point on the other end. Have your Cisco/Redback/whatever router run PPPoA on each of those ATM pipes and do MLPPP bonding between them. All that would be needed then is the CPE, and that's what the Open SDSL Connectivity Project is for... MS