What elements distinguish different ADSL service providers in Australia? Aren all ISPs that use Telstra ADSL infrastructure the same as each other?
There are several components in a full customer-to-Internet ADSL service path. Looking at the strict technical ones, these are: • The data link from the customers’ premises, via your local telephone exchange, and back to an in-state aggregation point operated by our wholesale ADSL provider (lets call this the ‘carrier-end-user path’) • The path from the aggregation point to the ISP concerned (lets call this the ‘ aggregating virtual circuit’). • The number, diversity, bandwidth, and congestion of the upstream Internet transit links that your ISP uses to connect to the rest of the Internet (and whether they use high performance routers inside their network that can keep up). Lets call this ‘whether your ISP doesn’t suck’. • Any other relevant speed boosting features your ISP has (for instance, high performance web caches; Local games servers; Local download servers, peering links). Lets call this ‘whether your ISP has sufficient clue ‘. • There is a very important additional issue, tech
