That model is beginning to change. Service providers including Bell Atlantic, BellSouth, MindSpring Enterprises, NorthPoint Communications and Telocity have announced major initiatives aimed at consumers. Meanwhile, Bell companies SBC Communications and U S West have lowered the prices of their DSL offerings to match the price structures of consumer-class cable modem services. The customer plugs the gateway into a computer, using a parallel port, an Ethernet network interface card or a universal serial bus port.
All service provisioning is done via the Web.
But they have rooms full of technical support people to walk a customer through the process. Our ISP partners don't want that, and we don't want that. The residential gateway also serves as a gating factor for upstream bandwidth, by setting the bandwidth limit at 1 Mbps. But it's not intended for heavy-duty commercial uses. Telocity is gaining access to DSL technology through data service competitors, which lease the copper lines from incumbent telephone companies.