| reply to Harddrive
Re: Boston Harbor is the culprit here. It's what happened here in Albuquerque, NM. When I first moved out here (OK I was lucky as I moved out to go to school, and in the campus dorms, we got ethernet hookup as part of the dorm cost, and so connected to the Internet via the universities 3 T3 lines...
The rest of the city, it was a shambles, with dialup the only option. The cable company (then Jones Intercable, since became Comcast) talked about deploying cable modem service for years, and nothing done. It wasn't *all* them though, a little something about how local politics can enter into things.
Then for instance we had a fiber cable that ran a good long way, down towards Los Lunas, but no one could tap into it. Why? The local phone company (US West then), AT&T, and the government each invested something in laying it, and so a teritorial dispute broke out. Until that was settled, no one could tap into it...so it sat there for years un-used. I'm not sure if they ever got that one settled to this day or not.
In some parts of the city, they terribly multi-plexed the lines to the point that people were getting 2,400 baud and the like, and it was really ticking people off. Would they address it? No, not even though the voice line of the professor who taught network topologies when I was taking it, had audible line noise at the box they install to mark the demarcation point outside his house. He was peeved, so started trolling their booth and telling everyone how they could do their job better, when US West showed up at a trade show to demo something ROFL Our whole lecture on phone wiring became "Why US West sucks, and how to do it better"...that was one strange lecture ROFLMAO Carol was also not happy...try running a computer business when all you get from the phone company is 56k that runs at more like 9,600 baud. Over that one must download all the drivers, operating system updates, BIOSes, tech documents etc, for every piece of hardware that goes into a computer they're building for a customer... And oh yeah, they custom build x86 machines, DEC Alphas, and Sun UltraSPARCs (having a broad base of customers from banks, to one of the local hospitals, Sandia, the government, etc...each looking for different things in a custom built comp of whichever platform)...
Anyway, in it was fall 1999, Jeto Communications came in and started offering DSL independent of the phone company (that didn't yet get into it). But then it was expensive (like $500 for equipment, another $500 for install, and $200 or so for just 133/133 IDSL)... Rates were bad, and all over the country people were reporting better rates...
However, this was just enough for others to get off their collective arses and start deployment. Over the next year, US West responded by beginning to implement DSL service of their own, then of course other providers moved in, prices were driven down to more normal rates (akin to what the rest of the country was paying).
After Jeto moved in with their own offering, it wasn't then long before everyone else started moving in. Actually rather short by comparison of the first guy moving in.
As to demand? Well when you consider a large city, and a number of well payed and technically knowledgeable employees, such as those who work at Intel (has a fabrication campus up near Rio Rancho, where they manufactured Pentium IIIs among other things), Sandia National Laboratories (involved in National Security research and development mostly), among other places...there is and has been demand.
[text was edited by author 2002-04-16 13:06:19] |
