Tuesday, June 15, 2010

U-Verse is Stomping on DSL

Many stories about customers of independent ISP's having DSL internet service disrupted by U-Verse. There will likely be more of this. What can you?

Not much. Since 2005, DSL has been un-regulated. The Indie ISP is able to resell DSL off ILEC DSLAM's through the grace of the ILEC and the "strength" of your commercial agreement. This agreement does not mention DSLAM's or territory or availability. Hence, no leg to stand on. As we have seen recently with VZ shutting off ISP access to the FiOS network, it's at their whim. (BTW, even for cableco's, access to their network is at their whim. Keep that in the back of your mind).

The back-office of any ILEC is a disaster. Systems do not flow into one another. So there will be mistakes and missteps that will disqualify and dis-allow DSL from being installed or even from being turned back on after a misadventure. We will be seeing more and more of this. Take heed. You will be frustrated and will spend countless hours on this.

Have a plan in place for you will do when this happens, including How will you retain the customer in the face of DSL service cut-off. <--- Very important!

This happens to CLEC's too. Remember when VZ was clipping copper after they turned up FiOS? Or have you read the FCC Network Notification reports? Those notifications are that copper plant is no longer available. So sorry. Bye-bye now. Sound familiar?

Back up plans:

  1. New Edge, Covad-MegaPath, Mammoth Networks are alternative DSL provider who might have a DSLAM of their own nearby.
  2. Your own DSLAM - although being a CLEC is not for everyone
  3. Wireless/WiMax - CLEAR, your own or another WISP
  4. Sell Apps like SAAS, backup, hosted email, email archiving, hosting, etc.
  5. Let then keep their email address or service with you for $X

It's coming so plan for it.

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