I'll amend that by adding "in my area" since there's no CIR from AT&T and ISPs that resell AT&T DSL where I live. I do understand the difference between "up to" ADSL and a circuit with a committed rate.

Where did I say I recommended cable? (I didn't.)

Things are different. AT&T seems to be quietly depreciating ADSL for U-verse here. In many places whenever they put in a VRAD previously supported faster ADSL speed packages mysteriously become unavailable. I had a 6Mbps package. U-verse came to the neighborhood. They told me it was no longer available (after I called about losing sync), disabled fastpath, and downgraded me to 3Mbps (max 2.7) package. There's also no ADSL2 from AT&T here.

You really think that?

I don't think that, I know that. It's what every DSL ISP has ever said - it's "up to" the advertised speed and unless it's dropping sync the first words out are "well sir, it's 'up to' the speed". If you're pushy you can get a tech to look at or "recondition" the line so you'll stop calling for a while but you're never guaranteed the full speed. Ultimately gave up on DSL even though I liked having my own CPE router, but my only options were U-verse or cable. I ended up with U-verse because there's a new VRAD next door.

Disclaimer: I am in the US, other countries probably handle things differently.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/5/01

If you did, then "up to" means anything in between. You'd be getting exactly what you're paying for as part of the "up to" modifier.

You can't really "lock in" anything. The provider is free to change the terms at any time in the future, it's just that you get 30 days to cancel without penalty if you decide you don't like the new terms.

I would imagine that the reason is that 21 inch racks are already a standard. They are widely used in telephony. Introducing a third standard (say 55 cm racks) would likely complicate things for little gain. Better to just call them 5334 mm racks.

The telcom rack standard is 23".

Because they called this one "open" and used a lot of green colors to imply its "greenness".

3. LOOK VERY CLOSELY AT CHEAP RACKS
A good rack will last you 10 years. A bad rack will last you 20 years and piss you off every time you go near it. Imagine mounting a full-depth POE switch to the front rail of a rack, then seeing that the back of the switch is about 2RU lower than the front, because the front vertical rail has bent under the weight. That's what happens when they make the vertical rails out of 1mm low tensile steel, not 2mm high tensile steel. Or, imagine having a server or router that has decided to put a RJ45 port on the front (usually an iLo port) and you find you have to either leave a whole RU free above the server to run the cat-5 cable back. Welcome to the joys of an APC rack, where the vertical rails are moulded to the edge of the rack.

What APC racks are you referring to? Even the cheapest NetShelter SX allows all vertical rails to be moved and they're thicker than 1mm. Or we have different definitions of cheap.

I guess we'll just have to start using the IANA TLD list (http://data.iana.org/TLD/) to check against.