In January 2007 I wrote an article in this magazine called ‘Max – Facts & Myths’ because, at the time, there was a great deal of confusion in the marketplace about whether or not the IPstream Max service was suitable for business customers and applications.
One year on and the IPstream Max product has now become the de-facto standard, has been developed and continues to be developed and BT are incentivising ISPs to move their non Max lines to Max lines. So, with these points in mind, I am revisiting the subject of IPstream Max.
Before I get into some of the technical information about future and past Max developments, it is worth pointing out some of the commercial benefits of Max. Since July 2007 it has been free for ISPs to do inbound migrations of DSL lines providing that the line migrates to a Max service. It is also free of charge for an ISP to‘re-grade’ their IPstream fixed rate lines to Max. The wholesale cost of migrating a line that doesn’t end up on a Max service is £11.00 and the cost of re-grading a fixed rate line to another fixed rate line is £5.00. The final indication, if one were needed, that BT would like all broadband lines to be Max lines is that in the January 2008 price changes, the rental of Max lines was reduced whilst the price of non-Max lines did not change.
New developments
Firstly, from 31st March you will be able to choose from 3 ‘service options’ on Max lines. These options allow you to choose whether you want to sacrifice stability for speed or vice versa. Max option 1 provides the same Max service you get today. Max option 2 provides more stability but a likely reduction in speed compared to option 1. Max option 3 provides the highest possible stability but again with a likely reduction in speed compared to option 1 and option 2.
I do occasionally come across resellers that will not install Max lines into their business customers because they are worried about the line re-syncing during the day. For these resellers the new service options will be an ideal solution. In most cases, although the customer may sacrifice obtaining the best speed available from a Max line, the customer will benefit from a bandwidth higher than the best fixed rate products, whilst not suffering from regular re-syncing of the line and the associated loss in service.
The second new development is that BT are planning to use the same Max ‘Dynamic Line Management’ logic on the new 21CN broadband products, doing away with the fixed rate products altogether. For those still convinced that Max lines are inherently unreliable, don’t panic! Even though the line will be dynamic, you will be able to set a profile on the line that fixes the sync rate if that is what you want.
Let me know what your experience of Max lines has been and what features you think would be useful to make business broadband services better. You can e-mail me at adrian.sunderland@griffin.com.
Source: Comms Business April
Adrian Sunderland, Technology Director, Griffin Internet
