Telocity was an Internet service provider providing digital subscriber line services to US residences. Their services were based on NorthPoint Communications' CLEC services, which went bankrupt. The business was sold to The DirecTV Group, where the service became known as DirecTV DSL.
Telocity was fairly unique in its operational policies for its time.
- Whereas most residential ISPs dynamically assign their customers an address (through DHCP, PPP, or PPPoE), Telocity understood the emerging reality of many consumers leaving their systems on all the time and therefore assigned each subscriber a minimally-sized IPv4 network (a /30 network in CIDR notation). The four addresses in this network were the address of the subscriber's network, the default route next hop address (sometimes called the "gateway" or "default gateway" address), the subscriber's system (or router), and the subscriber's network broadcast address. While this was wasteful of address space, it did provide each customer with their own address (a "static IP address").
- Whereas most residential DSL providers use ADSL, Telocity ran their network with SDSL. This provided the advantage of being able to upload content a lot faster, such as emailing photos for example.
- While somewhat expensive for the company, there was no penalty for reinstallation after moving to a new address. This was advantageous for people looking to relocate within the one year contract time.
- Rather than peering with higher tier ISPs in each city in which it operated, it had its own privately managed IPv4 network. On occasion this caused slowdowns and outages which may not have occurred otherwise.
External Links edit
archive.org archived page of their "about us" page August 15, 2000