U S WEST "On Demand" DSL service. (was Questions to ask DSL providers)

[Smith Jeremy <jrsmit2@uswest.com>]

"Anyways, starting 09-Aug-1999, USW will be offering a deluxe DSL and a
standard DSL. Deluxe is a dedicated DSL circuit that will allow bursting and
a standard DSL is a shard link with a fix throughput."

Not quite.  Basically, this is DSL with worse than a 1:1 DSL 'modem' on your
end to port on our end.
Right now, we don't oversubscribe at all--every ISP is having their
customers set their Cisco 6xx's to auto-retrain, and you're on 24/7.  Since
the "normal" user doesn't run any type of daemon or server on their machine,
and they aren't sitting in front of it constantly, the idea behind this is
to save on our hardware by having a certain number of DSLAM's per CO that
oversubscribe their ports, and require customers on that service to manually
connect whenever they intend to use the 'net.  There would also be an idle
timeout.  Potentially, of course, then, one could get a DSL "busy signal"
although with the initial oversubscription ratio, I really doubt that will
ever happen.
You've got to remember that all ISP's oversubscribe modems and (correct me
if I'm wrong, Bob, others?) that even the top-notch ISP's still do it
roughly at 1 modem per 5 customers, while places like AOL are more like
1:20.

However, since this prevents your box from being up full-time (and one would
have to write a little expect script to make it work anyhow) I doubt this
will be of interest to anyone on this list.

Jer