| Dave Burstein First Thank you Karl for carefully reporting a story others missed.
The data from Bell Canada is amazing. For years, essentially all commercial DSLAMs - including the Stingers Bell uses - are designed to be non-blocking (not congested.) Significant congestion therefore implies
1) Massive incompetence on the part of Bell Canada engineers. That's highly unlikely, because they have an excellent engineering staff.
2) They underprovisioned the DSLAM backhaul. By 2002 or thereabouts, major carriers including BellSouth and Softbank were routinely provisioning Gig-E's, often four to a CO.
(this is the likely cause, because they have referred to OC 3 155 meg links in some of their filings. The industry norm for years has been 8 times as high in any busy exchange.)
3) They are running wildly obsolete DSLAMs whose capacity their own engineers knew years ago would need replacing by now. This makes sense, because three years ago they spoke publicly of quickly replacing most of their existing DSLAMs with remote terminals closer to the customer (fiber to the node). That would replace most of the connections on the existing DSLAMs, allowing the old gear to handle the (presumably few) customers not switched to the new equipment. Similarly, they wouldn't have upgraded the backhaul links on DSLAMs they intended to most bypass.
-----------------
Bell Canada cut their capital spending 25% this quarter. I will now review all their postings to found specifics.
This is treating customers like the Romans treated the Sabine Women.
Dave Burstein,
Editor, DSL Prime |
