Guerilla ISPs

[Thomas Grant Edwards <tedwards@Glue.umd.edu>]

On LECs attacking ISPs, it is interesting to note that several 
medium-sized ISPs in Maryland which have over 100 phone lines are now 
getting them delivered by fiber direct to the ISP.

This is nothing new - what is news is that some of these fiber setups use
a form of SLC-96 systems which are incapable of carrying data traffic over
21 kbps with modern 28.8 kbps modems. 

Nobody new what the problem was for a long time, until finally Bell 
Atlantic admitted that there were some bandwidth limitations in some 
SLC-96 setups.  They went on to note that the tarrif required them to 
carry only acceptable voice and 4800 bps communication, nothing more, and 
that these ISPs were basically stuck with substandard lines.

The ISPs involved are now looking into alternative local dialtone, but it is 
few and far between.  Bell Atlantic is looking to get into the Internet 
business...perhaps they will engineer their own dialups properly, while 
giving low-data-rate fiber connections to ISPs?

And on the radio-last-mile service, I used to be enthusiastic about it, 
but I am no more.  It is pretty impractical to discuss VHF or UHF 
frequencies for real net connectivity, there just isn't enough bandwidth 
to be practical.  900 MHz and higher appear to be the best solution, 
using CDMA spread-spectrum in a microcellular environment.  Metricom 
(http://www.metricom.com) has CDMA microcellular modems which get 14.4 
kbps equivalent throughput in the 900 MHz region, and they have a large 
microcellular network already set up in the Bay Area with Internet 
connectivity.  Once 2 GHz technology becomes cheap enough (that's GaAs 
chips instead of Si), I can imagine wide-scale 56kbps service over 
microcellular networks.

But how can these things compete with @Home, which is promising 10 Mbps 
in and 128 kbps out of homes with cable modems?  

-Thomas Edwards