Well
In my case, I have dialtone but no DSL. Pacbell will not return my calls or emails. I am back to a 56K modem for doing work from home.
The funny thing is Pacbell is showing these commercials against the cable modem company on TV. I had cable modem for 2 years before I moved to the Bay Area and had only one outage that lasted less than a day (fiber cut, cox cable, arizona).
I think Pacbell hasn't a clue.
Go figure.
Bora Akyol
DSL NOCs to my experience are badly run and resolution time is not good (to put it nicely). They do not keep good documentation (or their people don't choose to use it) on what circuits affect which customers, which ISPs their outages affect, or how to match a CID with a dslam. Most notable in this area is Northpoint's NCC. My hope is that either (a) over time they will get more standardized in their outage notification and communication with the ISPs they partner with (b) the technology becomes outdated soon and customer connectivity does not rely on their technical support. Joseph
Doesn't this have more to do with the philosophy of the company providing service than the technology being deployed (DSL)? Maybe the problem is that DSL tends to involve LEC people who are infected with the obsolete lazy-monopoly attitude of the incumbents. In any case, are there unique operational challenges posed by DSL that are causing some of these problems? Is there anything we can do as a community to address them (or encourage the people who need to address them, to do so)? Maybe this discussion could evolve into something a little more useful than "my DSL provider sucks"..."me too", since there seems to be a lot of interest (or at least a lot of unhappy voices).. Joseph Birthisel wrote:
DSL NOCs to my experience are badly run and resolution time is not good (to put it nicely). They do not keep good documentation (or their people don't choose to use it) on what circuits affect which customers, which ISPs their outages affect, or how to match a CID with a dslam. Most notable in this area is Northpoint's NCC. My hope is that either (a) over time they will get more standardized in their outage notification and communication with the ISPs they partner with (b) the technology becomes outdated soon and customer connectivity does not rely on their technical support.
From an operational perspective, I think the best lesson to be learned is to grow only as fast as you can provide support for.
I wonder what the correct ratio is in terms of number of new subscribers vs number of support staff. Also what is the bandwidth that they are adding from/to the CO to serve all these new customers. I hope that they are not using the good old Erlang B models to calculate the amount of backbone bandwidth they need. Bora ----- Original Message ----- From: Chris Williams <chris.williams@third-rail.net> To: Joseph Birthisel <josephb@onramp.net> Cc: <nanog@merit.edu> Sent: Monday, June 05, 2000 1:07 PM Subject: Re: DSL (was shopping for NOCs)
Doesn't this have more to do with the philosophy of the company providing service than the technology being deployed (DSL)? Maybe the problem is that DSL tends to involve LEC people who are infected with the obsolete lazy-monopoly attitude of the incumbents.
In any case, are there unique operational challenges posed by DSL that are causing some of these problems? Is there anything we can do as a community to address them (or encourage the people who need to address them, to do so)?
Maybe this discussion could evolve into something a little more useful than "my DSL provider sucks"..."me too", since there seems to be a lot of interest (or at least a lot of unhappy voices)..
Joseph Birthisel wrote:
DSL NOCs to my experience are badly run and resolution time is not good (to put it nicely). They do not keep good documentation (or their people don't choose to use it) on what circuits affect which customers, which ISPs their outages affect, or how to match a CID with a dslam. Most notable in this area is Northpoint's NCC. My hope is that either (a) over time they will get more standardized in their outage notification and communication with the ISPs they partner with (b) the technology becomes outdated soon and customer connectivity does not rely on their technical support.
Doesn't this have more to do with the philosophy of the company providing service than the technology being deployed (DSL)? Maybe the problem is that DSL tends to involve LEC people who are infected with the obsolete lazy-monopoly attitude of the incumbents.
If I may sprinkle in my $.02, flames > /dev/null.. Even though I'm not part of the ILEC, I would like to point out that this isn't always true... There are also still quite a few issues with DSL technology. Some ILECs cannot provide DSL to you unless miniRAMs (mini DSLAMs) are deployed into the RT. Some ILECs have very high percentages of RT served customers (I know at least one in the 80% range), and the lack of deployable, working miniRAMs has been part of the deployment problem for the ILEC. And then there are issues around the OSS availability since you can't do mass deployments without having at least a working bandaid for the operations side of the house. Some solutions out there (including vendor offerings) are far from it. Some people (yes, even @ the phone company/ILEC) are working quite hard to not let their customers stand in the rain most of the time. Depending on ILEC, the ratio of those working hard/not so hard may very, and so may your mileage.
In any case, are there unique operational challenges posed by DSL that are causing some of these problems?
Yep. There are quite a few. I'm not sure this is the forum to address them for the ones that I've heard of, though. I think one of the biggest one is patience (I know, I know, but listen for a sec), since, regardless of what the vendors would like to tell you, this is by no means a fully baked technology. And, in addition to that, because of the way in which DSL is deployed, pricing models, customer bases, several other things aside from the actual DSL ckt are challenged as well. A lot of times, DSL drove other infrastructure technology upgrades. Not as a "nice to have" but as a "we can't provide DSL service without it". So, you have tremendous about of change going on at all sorts of points in the network. That alone can cause problems. And it's not neccessarily the SP screwing up, vendors are learning (new and old world) as we go as well. And as just about everybody with operational experience knows, all surprises aside, change is the number one reason for trouble.
Is there anything we can do as a community to address them (or encourage the people who need to address them, to do so)?
Not sure.
Maybe this discussion could evolve into something a little more useful than "my DSL provider sucks"..."me too", since there seems to be a lot of interest (or at least a lot of unhappy voices)..
Well, for one thing, it's important to understand that in addition to this being an evolving technology, not all DSL is the same. And even if you're using the same modulation, the way you are actually being served may be quite different. And, then there's organizational things. The guys who provide the line are a different organization than the guys who provide the transport from the DSL service provider to the ISP. And then there's lots of very bright people who are working nights and weekends to make it work at the ISP side. How do I know that? I happen to work with them. To me, those guys are heros. So, that being said, DSL is *MUCH* more than a phone line with high speed data traffic over it. I think for the most part, patience and accepting technological reality would help. I haven't grown a bellhead yet, so, if that's your gripe, save your energy. :) Cheers, Chris -- Christian Kuhtz, Sr. Network Architect Architecture, BellSouth.net <ck@arch.bellsouth.net> -wk, <ck@gnu.org> -hm Atlanta, GA "Speaking for myself only."
...also, don't forget that at least on the East coast, it seems that the LEC seems to work a lot less hard for resellers than for direct customers...Covad has filed numerous complaints, and has filed comments with the Massachusetts PUC against allowing Bell Atlantic to sell long distance in that state. -Chris
Some people (yes, even @ the phone company/ILEC) are working quite hard to not let their customers stand in the rain most of the time. Depending on ILEC, the ratio of those working hard/not so hard may very, and so may your mileage.
-- --------------------------- Christopher A. Woodfield rekoil@semihuman.com PGP Public Key: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xB887618B
participants (5)
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Bora Akyol -
Chris Williams -
Chris Woodfield -
Christian Kuhtz -
Joseph Birthisel