Yeah, service level agreements, that's what I meant.
I just assume the last mile would go up quick but backbone access to the Internet was the high cost item after all it the loop is cheap, gateway costs.
Comcast still has a $100/mo "business" connection AFAIK.
Carroll Kong wrote:
The high cost of a T1 has a lot of other benefits, including SLA agreements which is not the same as QoS (none of them offer that directly). These kinds of outages would not be tolerated or they would incur some kind of refund of sorts. Another cost factor is dedicated phone line runs, but you can get that with DSL if you specifically asked for it.
Once Fiber Optics Service (FIOS) is deployed en-mass, T1s might go the way of ISDN. Although FIOS is geared towards home users for now and FIOS has been in the works for years.
Japan was easily getting ludicrous 10Mb/1Mb links for $40-50/month. Reason? Dense locations allow for easier wiring. New buildings had fiber runs into them and/or ethernet runs to the rooms. This easily lets them leverage more powerful technologies over fiber.
You can still run servers if you pay a little more for higher end cable or DSL but then you get close to around $100/month. Admittedly, still a fantastic deal for the small business owner.
Also, cable came out first with the best service. @Home provided 6Mbp/2Mbps for about $40-50/month many years ago.
Things are easy when you are not paying for it. The investors of @Home (now defunct ATHM) were footing the bill for lax bandwidth controls.
The DSL Service was limited greatly by technology and deployment issues. As technology got better, improvements were made to beef up the speeds.
As for general core bandwidth costs, new technology advances in Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (DWDM) gave even more bandwidth up in the core.
The limiter in the technology has been reaching the customer base, and getting them wired up. When ADSL2 and DOCSIS 3.0 come out, the speeds will increase once again for everyone and we will all benefit.
