This is how DSL was originally envisioned to work, that's the main reason they used PPPoE, so you could authenticate and establish a session to whatever ISP you wanted. GTE even had 2 billing methods, the transport could be billed by GTE on the customer's phone bill with the ISP billing for bandwidth, or the ISP could bill the customer for the total service and pay GTE for transport on a wholesale basis. When Verizon bought GTE, they phased out the first method. At the beginning, I don't think GTE even planned to have their own in-house ISP competing with the other providers.
This all came from the dialup model, where customers could choose any ISP and have their modem call over the PSTN to the local access number for that ISP. But the LECs especially the Baby Bells got it in their head that the grass was greener on the other side, that bandwidth and content providers were making all the money, and they vowed never again to be the "dumb pipe". I think this explains a lot of LEC behavior to this day, like AT&T buying Time-Warner. The funny thing is that DSL was originally developed for "Video On Demand" service to compete with the cable companies, which the telcos feared would start offering voice service. The specs were for a 1.5M downstream channel to carry one MPEG2 DVD-quality video, plus a 16k bidirectional control channel. Later that was expanded to 6 Mbps to support up to 4 simultaneous videos, and later still the upstream channel was expanded to 640k because some people started thinking about a data network. At first the LECs were slow to roll out the service despite successful technical and marketing trials, because they became convinced the cablecos were undercapitalized and were not as big a competitive threat as had been imagined. By the time DSL was actually deployed, the focus had switched to Internet service, and the PPPoE protocol was developed and companies like Redback Networks were formed to support a model with multiple ISPs over the same physical network. -----Original Message----- From: Af [mailto:af-boun...@afmug.com] On Behalf Of Travis Johnson Sent: Thursday, October 27, 2016 9:35 AM To: af@afmug.com Subject: [AFMUG] Ammon City fiber Hi, This is a small "town" that is directly connected to my hometown of Idaho Falls. The road I drive to work on, the west side of that street is Idaho Falls, the east side is Ammon. We had a lot of wireless customers in the Ammon area when I was a WISP. They have been working on this fiber project for almost 10 years. It's a very interesting way to do it. They have bundled the $3,000 installation into a low interest "bond" kind of thing that is attached to the property... so that's about $15/month for 20 years. Then they have a small transport/utility fee for the fiber itself of $16.50/month. The most amazing part is the user can switch between providers from a website, picking the speed and service that they want, and it changes their service immediately. It will be interesting to see how this goes. They are supposed to have their first residential customer live by the end of this year. They are saying 100Mbps x 100Mbps service would be about $60-$70 per month total (with $0 installation cost). http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/what-if-switching-fiber-isps-was-as-easy-as-clicking-a-mouse/ Travis
