Hi All,

I have a couple of questions on SDSL for anyone in the Comms industry, or have simply implemented SDSL and would know the answers:

I have read that the equipment really needs to be "vendor matched". Is this referring to equipment at either end (in the case of an SDSL to SDSL VPN link), does it refer to equipment at one end (such as the SDSL router needing to match anything else hanging off it, or does it refer to equipment at the exchange?

The distance from the exchange is stated as something like 1.8 Miles or thereabouts. Is this right? It seems a bit short. Not many people would be able to use that then!?

Is it self install. I.e. wires only presentation, or is it an engineer install in all cases?

Cheers people.

When you get SDSL your ISP will usually provide the equipment and unless you can get the same kit for a lot less i'd strongly recommend you take it as there certainly used to be (4 years ago) a few issues with different people interpreting a spec differently.

1.8Miles seems not unreasonable as you can get 8MB up and down, that's quite a lot.

It certainly didn't used to be self install and your ISP would arrange to come and plug the router in, config it and get the link running as part of your install cost. This may however no longer be the case.

What are you using it for? If you need reliability, you don't get the same uptime guarantees you get with a leased line.

I've sold and been present on a few 'wires only' SDSL installs. We supplied the router ourselves to the customer (Zyxel) and the company we re-sell for sent us the router configs.

Looking over the shoulder of the engineer that set them up it seemed to be not unlike setting an ADSL circuit up. Username, password, static IP and so on.

SDSL to SDSL VPN link would really require the routers to be the same at both locations, other than that the only thing I can think of is Cisco or Nortel trying to sell more kit by saying this router needs to be installed with this firewall, switch etc.

The stuff I was doing tended to be SDSL to SDSL over a leased wire.