response 109 of 125:

Feb 4 01:20 UTC 1999

what's the monthly cost?  Are you using the Ameritech ADSL service?

response 111 of 125:

Feb 5 13:52 UTC 1999

WHat are the data rates coming and going?  Will Ameritech provision a
line 'inverted' with a wider bandwidth uplink and a narrower downlink?
  I believe there is at least one ATM card driver for Linux.  Do they
tell you enough that you could set up a different ATM card, and leave
theirs on the shelf?

response 113 of 125:

Feb 5 18:31 UTC 1999

SDSL should also be available in Ann Arbor sometime soon.  That's symetrical,
so it could be up to 1.5 Mbps in either direction.

response 115 of 125:

Feb 6 06:54 UTC 1999

If you're considering this for grex, there are some other issues that
mere speed that matter:
 (1) grex has roughly equal data rates in both directions.  If the
        link is much slower in one direction, that will become the
        bottleneck and limiting factor in performance.
 (2) Does the vendor have provisions for static IP ranges, subnets
        and routing?  Or do they only support a single dynamic IP address?
 (3) What kind of response delay do these other technologies have?
        With dial-up PPP, there is a *huge* (20ms+) delay to send
        even one really small packet, which means you can't get round-trip
        times down much below 40 ms.  ISDN doesn't have the delay,
        and that's one of the things that makes it better.
 (4) how well connected is the vendor?  How do they connect to the
        rest of the world, and what kind of packet loss rate are we
        talking about here?
 (5) security.  How easy is it for a vandal to snoop on the conversations of
        his neighbors?  Does he have to go out & tap the wires, or can he
        hack into the building and snoop on everyone from his apartment with
        a special epromp on his cable modem?

response 117 of 125:

Feb 6 22:26 UTC 1999

resp:116 Sorry, that was via ATM. :)

resp:115  I wasn't really suggesting that grex use it, mainly because of 
the latency problem.   Security, as it's set up now at Ameritech, 
wouldn't be a problem.  I'm not even connected to Ameritech, I have an 
ATM pvc straight to Alter.net.  No one else this side of Alter.net, 
without direct, privilaged access to the ATM switches at Ameritech, 
would be able to snoop.  Even then, I don't think they could.  ATM is 
point to point, and point to multipoint, as far as I know, requires 
support on my end.

response 119 of 125:

Feb 7 05:19 UTC 1999

UUNet is the world's largest ISP.  UUNet has some problems with spammers, but
I doubt you'll find an ISP who doesn't.  I get the impression they do cut
people off for spamming, but there are always more where those came from. 
I wouldn't call it friendly; maybe just overwhelmed.

response 121 of 125:

Feb 7 05:56 UTC 1999

   UU.net undoubtedly is huge, but at the same time direct calls to
their people for abuse problems have repeatedly gone unanswered.  email
too--I've sent several messages to uu net about Grex problems and I
have never ever gotten a useful reply from them on any issue.  Ever.
The same thing for some situations where I was helping others.

response 123 of 125:

Feb 7 17:51 UTC 1999

   I have heard that some mass spammers do actually make money
but they are usually more targeting specific markets.  A friend
who is a dog breeder recently started getting dog-specific spam
as an example.  She even bought from these spamateers unforunately.

response 125 of 125:

Mar 27 01:28 UTC 1999

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