[BC] Digital STL

[Dana Puopolo]

Again, I disagree. T1s can also fail-I had one go south last month. Yes, you
get an SLA with them-but you PAY for that SLA-sometimes hundreds of dollars a
month. Besides, even with that SLA, sometimes service is still slow. My
client's T1 failed on a Saturday morning and Verizon didn't fix it until late
Monday morning-a 48 hour outage. It was a bad line card at their studio. 15
minutes to fix-two days to get there! Yes, Covad gave them the month for free
(which is what they prefer to do rather then pay Verizon OT). What kept them
on the air the whole time? Their back up DSL! As far as your DSLs going down,
that's because of your modems. The one that goes down every two weeks probably
has a Motorola modem. They are well known in the industry for their
temperature problems. I much prefer Netopia or Westell modems. If you want the
untilane reliability, you can use a dual WAN router and two DSLs or a DSL and
a T1 or cable connection. That's what my client had-and they never went off.
Copper is copper-no matter what service is running over it.

-D

From: Tom Hartnett <hartnett.tom at gmail.com>

Arguments like this give me a real headache. Kind of like "My Toyota
doesn't accelerate on it's own, so they must all be safe".

DSL is a consumer-grade offering. There are rarely any Service Level
Agreements available. It has a medium reliability factor, and repair
is done at the Telco's convenience, not yours. Despite claims like "my
DSL never goes down" there's little value in recommending it for
mission critical 24/7 apps without qualification.