stephen(_at_)sprunk(_dot_)org (Stephen Sprunk) wrote on 21.11.04 in
<019b01c4cffe$290283d0$6801a8c0(_at_)stephen>:
Thus spake "Kai Henningsen" <kaih(_at_)khms(_dot_)westfalen(_dot_)de>
stephen(_at_)sprunk(_dot_)org (Stephen Sprunk) wrote on 20.11.04 in
<004201c4cf22$768a7680$6801a8c0(_at_)stephen>:
ISTR that the local competition (the one who's laying down cables like
crazy, pretty much every time a street is dug up)
That's also a major difference; our local competition re-uses the cable
plant of the incumbent carrier. Streets being torn up is largely due to
long-haul carriers (which mostly lay their own fiber, or swap strands on
different routes) putting new fiber down; nobody here lays new copper when
there's old copper still available.
No, the people I talk of (citykom.de) seem to lay down lines when the
street is dug up for some other reason, so as to already have it when
customers show up.
Back from when they were started owned by city services, it seems they
still have good contacts.
*Other* carriers indeed tend to simply rent the last mile from the ex-
monopoly (at regulated prices). (Or when we're talking DSL, just connect
to the DSL endpoints customers rent from the ex-monopoly with their ciscos
or whatever, and go on from there.)
Caller ID, Call Waiting, Three-Way and other "extra services" were added to
POTS lines here quickly after ISDN was available or even at the same time,
so there was little incentive for non-data users to switch to ISDN at all.
I have the impression some of that got added to POTS, but there was very
little consumer interest (apart from being able to suppress CallerID). The
general impression seems to be that people who want that want ISDN.
And anyway, S2M (30 channels on one pair) means big business definitely
wants ISDN.
Well, ours aren't toll-free either way.
Or to expand, there seem to be a few tariff experiments with free calls on
weekends and stuff like that, but IIRC those aren't limited to local
calls.
regulates differently) across entire cities. ISDN subscribers pay tolls for
"data" calls and sometimes even "voice" calls regardless of distance, though
Another differentation that over here only exists in the mobile market.
It was originally designed as an add-on to POTS here, and I'm not sure it's
even possible to add ADSL onto an ISDN line. The latter seems pointless, as
I heard - don't know if it's correct - that Deutsche Telekom actually
drove the development of whatever changes were necessary to do ADSL
together with ISDN. Something about frequency differences?
Very few sources for DSL "modems" when they started, and not able to cope
with demand for quite a while (both not enough "modems" and not enough
line cards) - which sounds compatible with the previous paragraph.
the only advantage of ISDN over POTS is data rate, and DSL blows both of
them away.
But DSL does not work (at least pre-VoIP) for end-to-end phone
connections. ISDN does.
Anyway, the point was that many people - mostly exactly those who would be
interested in DSL - *already had* ISDN. And thus a digitally-capable
copper pair.
Incidentally, I suspect a lot of the drive behind ISDN was that (a) we had
lots of copper pairs in use (perfectly fine to do ISDN on), and (b) using
ISDN meant more channels without more copper pairs - laying new pairs is
expensive.
MfG Kai
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