stephen@xxxxxxxxxx (Stephen Sprunk) wrote on 21.11.04 in <019b01c4cffe$290283d0$6801a8c0@stephen>: > Thus spake "Kai Henningsen" <kaih@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> > > stephen@xxxxxxxxxx (Stephen Sprunk) wrote on 20.11.04 in > > <004201c4cf22$768a7680$6801a8c0@stephen>: > > ISTR that the local competition (the one who's laying down cables like > > crazy, pretty much every time a street is dug up) > > That's also a major difference; our local competition re-uses the cable > plant of the incumbent carrier. Streets being torn up is largely due to > long-haul carriers (which mostly lay their own fiber, or swap strands on > different routes) putting new fiber down; nobody here lays new copper when > there's old copper still available. No, the people I talk of (citykom.de) seem to lay down lines when the street is dug up for some other reason, so as to already have it when customers show up. Back from when they were started owned by city services, it seems they still have good contacts. *Other* carriers indeed tend to simply rent the last mile from the ex- monopoly (at regulated prices). (Or when we're talking DSL, just connect to the DSL endpoints customers rent from the ex-monopoly with their ciscos or whatever, and go on from there.) > Caller ID, Call Waiting, Three-Way and other "extra services" were added to > POTS lines here quickly after ISDN was available or even at the same time, > so there was little incentive for non-data users to switch to ISDN at all. I have the impression some of that got added to POTS, but there was very little consumer interest (apart from being able to suppress CallerID). The general impression seems to be that people who want that want ISDN. And anyway, S2M (30 channels on one pair) means big business definitely wants ISDN. > > Well, ours aren't toll-free either way. Or to expand, there seem to be a few tariff experiments with free calls on weekends and stuff like that, but IIRC those aren't limited to local calls. > regulates differently) across entire cities. ISDN subscribers pay tolls for > "data" calls and sometimes even "voice" calls regardless of distance, though Another differentation that over here only exists in the mobile market. > It was originally designed as an add-on to POTS here, and I'm not sure it's > even possible to add ADSL onto an ISDN line. The latter seems pointless, as I heard - don't know if it's correct - that Deutsche Telekom actually drove the development of whatever changes were necessary to do ADSL together with ISDN. Something about frequency differences? Very few sources for DSL "modems" when they started, and not able to cope with demand for quite a while (both not enough "modems" and not enough line cards) - which sounds compatible with the previous paragraph. > the only advantage of ISDN over POTS is data rate, and DSL blows both of > them away. But DSL does not work (at least pre-VoIP) for end-to-end phone connections. ISDN does. Anyway, the point was that many people - mostly exactly those who would be interested in DSL - *already had* ISDN. And thus a digitally-capable copper pair. Incidentally, I suspect a lot of the drive behind ISDN was that (a) we had lots of copper pairs in use (perfectly fine to do ISDN on), and (b) using ISDN meant more channels without more copper pairs - laying new pairs is expensive. MfG Kai _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf