[Gllug] UK hit by major ADSL outage

[Alex Hudson]

On Wed, 2001-11-21 at 12:06, Rev Simon Rumble wrote:
> I can understand why you'd have it on a shared-network type of system
> like cable modems or wireless but why on a point-to-point system?
> They don't have some special authentication system on your ordinary
> phone line.  If you've got the line and it's connected at the other
> end to an exchange, you can use it.  Surely the same concept should
> work for ADSL?!?!?

Your ADSL has to be provided by someone (Demon, Nildram, OpenWorld,
whoever). They need to be able to tell who your provider is somewhere,
which requires some piece of equipment to be configured to give this
information. A login is as good as any other I would have thought.

With phone lines, they can tell pretty easily whose service you're
using: it's BTs, unless you dial a special prefix number. That prefix
number is, again, a login of sorts. 

Cheers,

Alex.

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