On Sat, 07 Jun 2008 10:30:40 +0100, Orchid XP v8 wrote:

> Jim Henderson wrote:
> 
>> Quantity discount.  My DSL line is provided by Covad, even though the
>> telco to the house is Qwest.  My DSL service is actually cheaper than
>> Qwest's DSL service.
>> 
>> Makes perfect sense to shop around.
> 
> Now, see, that makes absolutely no sense at all.
> 
> That's like those telephone providers where you dail a special prefix
> and then the number you actually want to call. They direct your call
> from the UK, across the Atlantic to the USA, route the call, and direct
> it back to the UK, and *this* works out cheaper than BT? WTF?!? o_O
> 
> Similarly, when I looked into this, several places online could sell me
> an Apple Mac. It turns out the most expensive place to buy one is...
> from Apple. WHAT?? It's more expensive to buy it from the manufacturer
> than from some middle-man who has a whole bunch of extra costs and
> overheads to cover?
> 
> Reality doesn't make sense to me...

It's called "bulk pricing".  Covad can buy telco service in bulk.  I 
can't. :-)

> Anyway, you get your DSL cheaper, but what if it breaks? If it's
> actually a Qwest DSL line, presumably only Qwest can actually fix it if
> it breaks. And that means that if it breaks, you have to spend 3 hours
> on the phone to Covad to convince them that it's broken, and then they
> have to spend 3 hours on the phone to Qwest, and then *maybe* somebody
> will fix it?

That is a fair point.  Had a lightning strike here a few years ago (at 
the Covad CO), and they couldn't track it down.  They blamed Qwest, and 
Qwest blamed them.

Jim

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