On 20-Dec-2006, at 17:41, John @ netTRUST wrote:
Customers do not expect the world for free and if you want to compare it to Frame Relay (A serice that ISP's like yourself sell as 'carrier grade') - that is just another overpriced, unreliable piece of you know what - but one which comes with a *marketing* edge - It's expensive, comes with a pokey SLA and the 'feel good' aspect that if Telecom / Telstra is screwing you at every bill - it must be the bee's knee's.
With respect to network diversity, the comparison you want to make is the cost of conditioning and connecting an *existing piece of copper infrastructure, paid for long ago by the taxpayer* to the cost of that plus *a second, diverse, independent access to your building such that you have protected access to the core*. Frame Relay is typically delivered over an unprotected local loop, just like DSL (although in some cases that unprotected loop may be in- building from a SONET node, which if you're lucky will have a protected path to the core). (If you're extra lucky, that protected path will actually run over different strands of fibre, and follow different fibre routes, and won't be two wavelengths provisioned on the same pair of glass.) The difference between frame-relay and DSL tends to be the contracted commitment by the supplier to fixing it when it breaks, a fact which you alluded to, snarkily, above. The cheapest way to get diverse access to something is to find two different providers who hate each other sufficiently that they won't allow common use of fibre routes or conduit, and whose aggregation and switching nodes are in different parts of town, and use both to access whatever it is you're trying to reach (a datacentre, the Internet, the PSTN, whatever). If you're a business in an established, multi-tenant building, it's perfectly possible that you can buy such things for relatively sane amounts of money, without anybody having to do a new build. Diversity in suppliers is in many cases better than diverse access to a single provider, since you are dealing with different sets of engineers who hopefully aren't all getting drunk together in the same room in Palmerston North, reconfiguring their routers from their laptops and smart phones at the same time for fun. If you're a residential user in some parts of the country you have multi-supplier options (e.g. a TCL cable modem and a Telecom DSL service, or Telecom DSL and Woosh, or frame-relay and Citylink metro ethernet, or ISDN and 3G). Multi-homing using devices which are naturally infected with such horrors as NAT and dynamic addresses is not fun, but it can be done for those who are prepared to put in (or pay for) the hours of fiddling involved. But getting a single supplier to build diverse access to your office/ house/whatever is unlikely to be tremendously cheap, unless you're a big customer or located in a particularly strategic location in a larger market. This is not a new development, or a NZ-specific development. There's a reason that the oft-quoted five-nines reliability of the PSTN is only ever quoted in respect to the core, and not the last mile. Joe