LLU and ADSL Max

I'm having trouble finding the difference between LLU and ADSL Max. I did try a quick search to see if the topic had been covered before but couldn't find anything concrete. As I understand it LLU is where the local exchange is unbundled to provide speeds of up to 8mb. But as far as I can tell that's exactly what ADSLmax is too. Is ADSLmax just a promotional name used by BT Broadband or do they actually use different technologies?

Thanks in advance for any replies.

ADSL max is just the name for BT wholesales fully rate adaptive (upto 8Mbit/s) service that IPstream/Datastream resellers use.

LLU is the unbundling process.

The version of DSL offered by unbundlers can vary, most common are ADSL and ADSL2+

ADSLMax is just promotional name for BT Wholesales up to 8Mbps ADSL product.

Speeds can vary depending how things like how operator sets its interleave and target noise margins.

Andrew

ADSL Max - the BT wholesale offering. Based on fully rate adaptive ADSL1 only, but with lots of BT proprietary add-on technology to monitor and configure ADSL performance, intended to limit the speed to what the line is reliably capable of over an extended period. Many people in these forums have problems apparently caused by this add-on technology, although undoubtedly this is a tiny minority. For the majority it gives a more reliable service, but at the expense of some speed. ADSL Max is available to almost all households, with a large variety of ISPs reselling the BT wholesale product.

LLU - competitors to BT wholesale providing their own products based on both ADSL1 and ADSL2+, giving speeds up to 24Mbit if you're fairly close to the exchange. These are pure ADSL1/2 based, without the BT add-on technology. One of the key benefits of LLU is that it is considerably cheaper to provide, as you can see by the product pricing of companies that offer both LLU and BT wholesale (look at UKOnline pricing for example). A disadvantage is that changing suppliers involves physically rewiring at the exchange, sometimes resulting in a long delay without service. LLU is only available to 50-60% of households, and from only a handful of ISPs.