On 2009-10-11, at 19:22 , Joe Greco wrote:
(*) In the late 1990's, I heard the most astonishing claims made by
a new
entrant into the Milwaukee ISP market, about how some of the "other"
ISP's
"shared" lines between customers and this decreased your speeds.
They had
no clue who I was, so I engaged their technical person for a while
who set
out to convince me that other ISP's really _did_ do this mythical
line-
sharing - multiple modems to one port. Until I started talking
about the
technical aspects, that is.
Not so mythical. Around the same time period, we found out about an
ISP offering always-on ISDN BRI service for such a low price that it
could not possibly make sense. We wondered how they could make ends
meet at that rate until we found out how they did it. They daisy
chained multiple customers' BRI lines together, using the second B
channel from one customer to connect the next customer down the line.
Once, one of their customers switched to our service and we
reconfigured their router (a legitimate action: both router and BRI
line belonged to the customer). Who knows how many downstream
customers we broke by doing that.
-Phil
