interesting.

DSL is now considered obsolete, and justly so, but in 1997 it was the Next Big Thing. By the time they got around to rolling it out, it was OBE due to Comcast and others more aggressively deploying their cable internet services.

But DSL could have been rolled out YEARS before it actually did. I know it's hard to put it in perspective, but in the late 90s cable modems weren't as ubiquitous as they are now. Most people didn't have access to high bandwidth internet access.

In that respect, DSL would have been a huge hit in, say, 1997. The technology was there, the demand was there. So why didn't they simply deploy it fast and get the edge on Comcast et al.?

At the time I was connected with several IT industry consultant types, and we talked about DSL every day. The biggest factor was all the other data services they were selling that were 1) inferior, bandwidth wise and 2) incredibly lucrative for them. I'm talking ISDN, T1, and frame relay mostly.

ISDN was one step up from POTS and the Bell's cheapest attempt to provide digital services to the consumer. Bell South charged up to $80 per month for ISDN, Bell Atlantic over $200/month. And that was for 128kbps. Other parts of the country had much cheaper ISDN rates.

T1 of course was the Bell's big data service cash cow, for which they were able to charge over $2000/month for 1.44 Mbps (both ways). It was 100% a business offering.

So on the one hand they were making a lot of money off of overpriced data services, and not facing a lot of competition from cable, yet. And on the other hand they had a boatload of customers willing to pay about $30 a month for, say, T1-class DSL bandwidth. Who wins out?

That's why PacBell crafted a compromise between their own and their customers' best interests by offering a 384kbps DSL service. See what they did there? They were able to ride the T1 bus a few more years and soak the businesses that relied on the T1 bandwidth, while still offering a comsumer grade high speed internet service.

At the time I would have KILLED for 384kbps DSL. I was playing a lot of Quake online deathmatch and all I wanted was low ping. All I had here was your standard analog modem, and nothing else.

By the time Bell Atlantic decided to deploy their 1.6 Mbps DSL in my area (about 3 years after PacBell, I think) Comcast had already upgraded the local fiber loop and started offering cable modems. I've been using them ever since, around 15 years I think. Never owned DSL. And Verizon has already deployed fiber to the curb in my neighborhood so if I ever decide to switch it will be to fiber.

But had they rolled out DSL in 1996 or so, the Bells would have had a big edge in installed customer base and could have transitioned them to fiber more easily. Instead, they played it safe and squeezed out the last few years of overpriced data services.

[Post edited by Baltimore Hokie at 02/16/2016 10:30PM]