Closing In On 1Gbps Using DSL 230
angry tapir writes "DSL vendors are using a variety of methods, such as bonding several copper lines, creating virtual ones, and using advanced noise cancellation to increase broadband over copper to several hundred megabits per second. At the Broadband World Forum in Paris, Nokia Siemens Networks became the latest vendor to brag about its copper prowess. It can now transmit speeds of up to 825M bps over a distance of 400 meters."
400M ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Um. great, how many people are within 2 city blocks of the local wire center?
They need to be working on extending the speeds out past 15,000 feet (5,000M) if they want folks to get excited.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:400M ? (Score:4, Informative)
Me. I've just had vsdl service installed, which utilizes QWest's FTTN(Fiber To The Node) service. The DSLAM is about 2 blocks away from my house. I'm getting 20mbit down/5 mbit up. It's awesome. I see it as the future of DSL, simply bridging the last mile problem from fiber nodes.
I'm on U-Verse, and have been very pleased with it. U-Verse is also VDSL, and while it's no gigabit connection it works very well. Somewhat ironically (well, irritatingly) there's an AT&T VRAD right across the street from my house, not fifty feet away. But I'm not connected to it: I'm running from a box down on the main drag, maybe a mile away. I'm currently on the 12 mbit/sec plan (saved a few bucks) but I get about 15 which is fine for me, and when I first got it I was rated at 18 mbit/sec, and was getting a solid 22. Not bad for phone wiring. Plus which AT&T gives me a 2 mbit/sec backchannel, which I find very useful (compared to the 30 or 40 kbit/sec up I got from Comcast, when I was on their 20 mbit/sec plan!) And it's consistent, usable bandwidth in both directions.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I've had Comcast for over 8 years in 2 different cities and have always maintained faster upload rates than that. By a number of multiples!!
Re: (Score:2)
30-40kbit, comeon...lets try to be somewhat accurate on this website please.
I can also attest to pulling torrents down at similar speeds, so I do find SpeedTest.net to be an accurate indicator of bandwidth.
Re:400M ? (Score:5, Interesting)
**replying to myself. just ran speedtest.net and got 15 mbit down, and 2.6mbit up. I am on the standard internet plan. 30-40kbit, comeon...lets try to be somewhat accurate on this website please. I can also attest to pulling torrents down at similar speeds, so I do find SpeedTest.net to be an accurate indicator of bandwidth.
I am being accurate. And I ran any number of bandwidth checks, even ran them periodically and logged them so I could try to reason with their tech support people. They wouldn't believe me, claiming it was my problem. Not that it mattered: it was like trying to argue semantics with chimpanzees, but it cost them a good customer when U-Verse rolled around (oh, they screwed with me in other areas as well.) I once asked a tech if I was some kind of a test case to see just how much a customer could or would tolerate. He just shrugged. Actually, their on-site guys were pretty sharp, and always tried to give me what I was paying for. It was the phone support and provisioning people that gave me the most grief.
Re: (Score:2)
I believe you.
My up speed is slow too: Only 128 kbit/s, but even then it interferes with the down channel (slows it down). The practical limit for uploading, without slowing web or torrent downloads, is just 80 kbit/s.
Re: (Score:2)
If you prioritize acks, you won't see that problem with premature choking
Re: (Score:2)
Please describe a method for prioritizing acks using U-Verse with the ubiquitous and irreplaceable 2-wire "residential gateway" which is supplied.
(And, hint: If it involves egress throttling on an external router and DMZ Plus on the gateway, you fail. DMZ Plus is broken.)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
How is DMZ Plus broken? I turned off the wireless on my 2-wire and used DMZ plus to forward to my own router. Everything works perfectly, xbox, ps3, computers, bittorrent, etc.
I've been doing this for as long as I've had Uverse. I use two wireless routers to tunnel my network to the other side of my house rather than run cable. This allows me to have wired networks in each room (nice for file transfers) with wireless N connecting the two rooms on each end of the house. No way I could pull that off with the
Re: (Score:2)
Time Warner Cable, Road Runner, payed for the Turbo Package.
30 MB down / 0.5 MB up. I wish I had faster up, can't complain about the down :)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I'd like to but it's not installed here yet.
Plus I don't need symmetric speeds. I'd rather FiOS were configured as 50/10 or 55/5 Mbps.
Missing the point (Score:5, Interesting)
So, while you get 30 up, and when connecting to others on the same provider's network, you're getting 30 up, the provider is simply throttling the overall up at their data center where they host servers for other businesses.
Remember the provider isn't paying for 10 terabit up and 500 gigabit down. They have a large group of switched fibers. They still run much of it over OC-(insert big number here) networks as Sonet is for the time being a hell of a lot easier to load balance and provide redundancy on than using massive Ethernet load balanced trunks.
So, what are they going to do with 9.5 terabits of unused upstream anyway?
Also remember that with the exception of P2P traffic, upstream between providers is becoming less important since Akamai, Google, etc... are distributing content all over the Internet anyway. If you're a provider with so much as 4U of rack space to spare, Google or Akamai will gladly install a caching server that will offload insane amounts of traffic from you. So if you have 100,000 users all watching the same viral video on youtube, after the first time it's viewed on your ISP, the video is probably located on a server at your ISP.
Re: (Score:2)
FIOS... 30/30 :)
Join us....
Would if I could. But for now, I'll live with my 12/2.
Re: (Score:2)
I like to bash Comcast as much as the next guy, but 30-40 kbit/sec....exactly when did you switch?? I've had Comcast for over 8 years in 2 different cities and have always maintained faster upload rates than that. By a number of multiples!!
Not where I am. This was a few years ago. Then U-Verse moved in, and now I understand that Comcast has improved considerably. This was during the height of their anti-torrent "network management" madness too. Not only was I getting hit with fake RSTs, but they cut the backchannel too, presumably for the same purpose (slowing down torrents.)
Re: (Score:2)
What's a backchannel?
Data going the other way, i.e. when you upload.
Re: (Score:2)
>>>The DSLAM is about 2 blocks away from my house.
If your company upgraded from VDSL to VDSL-2 you would be close enough to get 180 Mbit/s down (and 20 up).
Not to nitpick... but it's (Score:3, Interesting)
And VDSL2,3,... is the short term future. Any time there's a nasty hack like DSL to cope with delivering over existing lines, at some point, it becomes necessary to replace the old, aging cables with something that is capable of lower noise. When t
Re:400M ? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
You'd be surprised how many customers can be covered by that, as others have pointed out.
Personally, I'd be more interested in finding out what they can push to 900m though... that's the limit that my DSL provider seems to be using for deciding who they can sell IPTV to (think ATT's uVerse), and those customers are on a 27mbit VDSL2 profile. Their network seems to be designed to limit distance to the DSLAM to 1km or less whenever possible.
Re: (Score:2)
In places like Korea and China, probably quite a few people.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
>>>In places like Korea and China, this isn't an issues, as they left behind speeds like this a decade ago.
Bull.
Here's the average speed for these countries using speedtest data:
KOREA 35.6 Mbit/s - much less than 825
CHINA 3.5 Mbit/s - much less than 825
Re: (Score:2)
>>>how many people are within 2 city blocks of the local wire center?
Most of the Japanese nation, apparently. Japan uses almost nothing but DSL, and they are the world's second fastest country (average net speed). Just because DSL may not work in the mostly-rural US/Canada, doesn't mean it can't work for other cultures.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah. This is pretty much the first thing that came to my mind when they start crowing about crap like this. How fast it can be if you live next door to the CO means fuckall if Joe Internet User on the edges of town is lucky to get 1.5Mbsp/384Kbps. Fuck making it faster, make it reach further out.
Re: (Score:2)
Um. great, how many people are within 2 city blocks of the local wire center?
They need to be working on extending the speeds out past 15,000 feet (5,000M) if they want folks to get excited.
With more neighborhoods being served with Fiber to the neighood distribution cabinet I would say the majority of people in newer neighborhoods are withing reach.
Old cities, not so much. You often nave multi-mile copper runs in those places.
But fiber is being pushed closer every day even when you don't have fiber in front of your home.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, yes, we all are pretty much aware of DSL limitations by now. But the point is as fiber is pushed into the neighborhood the distance over copper is reduced. Because what used to have to be located in the nearest exchange can now be in the distribution panel on the corner of the block.
Re:400M ? (Score:4, Interesting)
Because running 5km of fibre for you (and 5km of fibre for the other people on your exchange which is presumably in the best location they could afford to put it, so we're talking everyone in a 5km *RADIUS* of the exchange, which means 20-30km + of cabling at least in some sort of web or star configuration) and a handful of people is a extreme loss. It would have to be fibre - we have nothing else that can really go that distance - and it would probably need repeaters for that length.
So they run the cable, dig up, say 20km of road / install 20km of poles / repeaters/ shielding, etc. just to get a fibre into a box somewhere nearer to you in order to do DSL or whatever they need (you to a nearby exchange doesn't matter, because there's no end of cheap, easily available hardware and wiring that can already be used to get you connected to that fibre). If you live in a rural area, say that connects 20,000 or 30,000 people. How much do you think that's actually going to bring in each year versus their outlay, repairs, upgrades, etc? It wouldn't cover the interest on a loan of the amount required to do the work in the first place (so they are theoretically better off by just leaving that money in a bank account, earning interest instead of costing it).
It's not a question of technologies - 5km is a huge distance - over radio for more than a handful of people at the bandwidth you're wanting is ludicrously difficult (and just fills the airwaves for even more miles around, making it harder to do more) or you'd have amateur radio networks doing it all the time at those speeds. Plus, you'd never get a license for it. Over cable, that's a huge amount of digging, burying, pole-installing, raising, repairing, planning, obtaining permission, and an awful expense in copper too (people are stealing copper cables over here for things like that because of its scrap value). Over fibre, you have all the same problems but only get no theft value, almost-infinite upgradability, conversion costs and extreme fragility as differences.
It's mostly quite sensible business reasons - it's ridiculous to expect a company to make a loss unless it's forced to (like some British ISP's are in order to fulfill their telecoms license obligations). That's a governmental problem - to force them. If they *are* forced to, they can't give you the same as everyone else because the technologies don't cover the same distance, and your maintenance / installation costs are ridiculously higher so you'll get slower / more expensive broadband. They won't get any fans by doing it, they'll just get people moaning that it's not as reliable / fast as other people's inner-city service again. Years ago, 56k was the standard, if you didn't have that, you were "deprived". Now it's 2Mb. By the time an installation is settled, it'll be 4Mb or 8Mb or whatever. They wouldn't recoup any money on their investment before they were digging it up again to replace everything.
Don't blame your ISP, or the scientists for not giving you the technology (that amount of combined bandwidth over that wide an area is all but impossible), blame your government for not subsidising what is now seen as an "essential" service. Get it classed as a utility, then it's in the same category as not having running water, or sewerage, or electricity. Until then, there is NO business case to ever do it. Without a business case, no business will do it, and no bank will fund them to do it, and no business that ever does it would ever be shown gratitude. When the government starts subsidising or enforcing it, then you'll have the service they lay down, and probably no more, and it'll be a cost burden on every other ISP user in the country.
It's like demanding that you get access to the city center by vehicle in the same time and same cost that a city-dweller can. Yeah, it can probably be done, but there's zero business case for it at all (in fact, there's almost infinitely more business case for you to get to the city centre in five minutes than for you to get br
Too slow (Score:2)
I was going to be the first to comment but I'm more than 500 meters away from my phone company's nearest DSLAM, so I have to wait for them to build another one halfway in between.
Re: (Score:2)
AT&T puts those boxes on every block in our neighborhoods. Uverse currently runs at 8.5MHz over flat pair here.
Re: (Score:2)
AT&T puts those boxes on every block in our neighborhoods. Uverse currently runs at 8.5MHz over flat pair here.
Maybe they could twist some speed out of it.
And yet, I'm stuck (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, I still find myself with a 2 Mbps download speed tops. This technology needs to be actually utilized! It's killing me to read this stuff and then never see it in action.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:And yet, I'm stuck (Score:5, Funny)
though there is political argy-bargy about it
I think there's something wrong with your new, high-speed network. It seems to be getting lots of line noise coming across as random characters on your Slashdot posts.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:And yet, I'm stuck (Score:4, Funny)
ABC.net.au huh. That's what, the gold version of ABC radio?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
though there is political argy-bargy about it
I think there's something wrong with your new, high-speed network. It seems to be getting lots of line noise coming across as random characters on your Slashdot posts.
Can't you read Australian? Its not like we speak English here you know.
Re: (Score:2)
I keep hoping this will actually get through, it might give us some sort of future after we run out of stuff to dig out of the ground. Tragically, the opposition, having an obsession with having zero debt and no actual policy of any significance(mind you the government doesn't have an awful lot of policy either) has decided that the NBN is going to be their issue of differentiation. If the current mob don't hold on long enough or make the cancellation policies in the contracts sufficiently horrendous, we pr
Re: (Score:2)
The opposition seems not just opposed to the NBN but to anything at all that weakens the near monopoly of Telstra on fixed-line communications (there are a few places where alternatives such as Optus Cable exist but for most of this country, if you want fixed-line phone or internet, you need to go wtih Telstra)
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah and cable is being pulled in Brunswick, Victoria only a few k from my home. I know a guy who lives a bit closer to the test area who has been invited to participate in tests.
Re: (Score:2)
Yep, we do and as far as I am concerned it is money well spent, regardless of other priorities.
400m! (Score:2)
The distance between my house and the nearest telco connection for DSL is about 500m. There is only one housing development closer and they were built long after my home went up. My speeds were twice the advertised rates due to this close distance as they were ramping up bandwidth so as to hit the minimum by the end of the line. That advertised rate? 2000/256.
Hey, I mean it's great an all that they are doing research to come up with faster DSL usage. Unfortunately while the speeds can be theoretically (or e
Only 825 Mbps? (Score:2)
I can do better with my carload of 3 TB hard drives! Latency's a little slower, but no asked about that.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Never underestimate the bandwidth of SSDs on ostriches..
how exactly does 'creating virtual ones' work? (Score:3, Interesting)
Someone please explain how this works. Is this some bizarre artifact of the signaling protocol, such that the only way to overcome a design flaw is to use some incomprehensible technique treating physical wires as virtual wires? How can that possibly be better than just natively signaling faster on the wires?
Re:how exactly does 'creating virtual ones' work? (Score:4, Funny)
They can do this using two or more pairs. Most likely it has to do with harmonics, impedance, alloys and compositions and things with molecular structures that my primitive intellect cannot understand.
Re: (Score:2)
Hail to the king baby!
DSL Phantom Mode (Score:2)
Yes, very interesting and realistically just a way for the big telcos to not have to upgrade the wire and instead upgrade the modem and equip at the CO. Take a look at the graphic here [gigaom.com].
Looks like today's announcement is the extension of existing work last year, but using 4 copper wires (ie, 2 phone lines).
What's interesting is noone mentions latency, and whether this actually will increase responsiveness or just throughput.
Direct link to graphic (Score:5, Informative)
https://gigaom.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/dslphantommodeexplained.jpg [wordpress.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
so THATS how SEO works!
Re: (Score:2)
Interesting. 4 wires to 3 pairs worth of bandwidth. It seems like it should be possible to signal at 4C2 = 6 pair worth of bandwidth if you were signaling optimally.
Re: (Score:2)
I think the way to look at it is this (linear algebra): Your input to the four wires, at each time, is a 4-vector. The common mode is another 4-vector, (1,1,1,1); that picks up a lot of noise. Nevertheless, you have the whole orthogonal complement to (1,1,1,1) to work with. The vectors (1-1,0,0), (0,0,1,-1), and (1,1,-1,1) -- the two pairs and the "virtual pair," respectively -- form an orthogonal basis for this subspace. So you represent all data as linear combinations of those three vectors.
You might
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Someone please explain how this works. Is this some bizarre artifact of the signaling protocol, such that the only way to overcome a design flaw is to use some incomprehensible technique treating physical wires as virtual wires? How can that possibly be better than just natively signaling faster on the wires?
Think of it as HyperThreading for the Tubez....
Re: (Score:2)
trunking?
Noise (Score:3, Funny)
"advanced noise cancellation"
So that rules out most of the internet and email then, eh?
Re: (Score:2)
No, but good luck reaching idle [slashdot.org].
Re: (Score:2)
So that rules out most of the internet and email then, eh?
RTFA- this was in Paris, not Canada.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
It can be both [google.com].
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe not that drastic, but you probably won't see the comment section under Youtube videos any more.
4 pairs (Score:5, Interesting)
They are using 4 pairs to achieve that 825 Mbps speed.
Note that 1000BASE-T also uses 4 pairs to achieve 1000Mbit over a shorter 100 meters. I'm curious what maximum range 1000BASE-T will actually work at (100m is guaranteed), and if it were to work at 400m, what the bandwidth would be.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
They are using 4 pairs to achieve that 825 Mbps speed.
Note that 1000BASE-T also uses 4 pairs to achieve 1000Mbit over a shorter 100 meters. I'm curious what maximum range 1000BASE-T will actually work at (100m is guaranteed), and if it were to work at 400m, what the bandwidth would be.
Yes they're using 4 pairs but it's not the same thing. You're forgetting that they are working with cat 3 copper cabling not cat 5 or 6.
Re:4 pairs (Score:4, Informative)
I doubt most of the copper POTS wiring out there is cat 3. The phone wire used in most homes is the old 4 conductor cable that did not have twisted pairs. Nowadays I believe most of the four conductor phone cable is indeed twisted and meets CAT 3 standards. I bought some at home depot not too long ago and it was 4 conductor CAT 3 twisted pair with RED/GREEN and BLACK/YELLOW pairs. The non twisted pair might still be sold so no guarantee there.
And that is just the home wiring. Who knows what crusty old non twisted pair cable lurks between homes and the central office.
And getting back to the grand parent poster:
1000BT is an IEEE 802.3-2008 standard. It not only defines the data layer (how the bits are transmitted) but also the physical link which defines the electrical interface.
DSL is different than the 802.3 standard both at the data link layer and the physical layer. So its an apples to oranges comparison. Gigabit is Ethernet and DSL and other broadband technologies are completely different.
Re: (Score:2)
I'll answer that, its called untwisted pulp in the boonies. Good luck running *SL of any variant over it
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, worked as head engineer for ISPs forever. Even a lot of areas of real cities have crap lines, Bell cherry picks to hell and back. It doesn't matter if you live on the CO's back step, if your neighborhood is poor or an unlikely amazing return on investment in 3 years, they aren't going to bother upgrading the 5 1600 pair anacondas serving your area from 1930.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Otherwise we are gonna end up with another IPV4 situation where by the time we realize we need to get on the ball everything is gonna be so far behind it'll cost 20 times more and be a giant mess.
I don't see how not upgrading older lines is going to make things any worse down the line. In fact, it seems more likely that it'll make future upgrading cheaper. Consider this: If we upgraded the entire communication infrastructure of the U.S. every time we thought of something faster, how much more money would've been spent on it?
That's not to say that it doesn't suck for people who can't get cable/fiber, but it's not like some day in the future we'll all be wishing we had upgraded our old phone lines soo
Great... (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
825Mbs @ 400m ... I'd rather not live INSIDE the CO, thanks....
Well, the heat coming off the racks of DSLAMs and other equipment will save on your winter heating bill.
Re: (Score:2)
It sucks in the summer though, unless you're in Michigan... then it just sucks all year =)
Does. Not. Mean. Shit. (Score:2)
I have the same piece of copper that they gave my house when it was built 20 years ago.
They are not willing to dig just to upgrade it to give me gigabit DSL. If they were, they'd just drop in fiber and get the massive headroom that the barely-utilized bandwidth of glass wires gives you, coupled to easily-upgradable yet current state-of-the-art lasery bits on the end.
So I'm using the TV cable for 30 mbps broadband right now, and wishing that the Corporation Commission would use its power to dissolve the LAT
As long as it's Adsl I don't want it (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:As long as it's Adsl I don't want it (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
His ISP just needs a beating. I'm on cable, and just checked the ping time to a big local newspaper.
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 4.762/7.914/14.891/2.623 ms
That I can reach another server in less than 5ms means it's not the cable tech that is the problem, it's overloaded or oversold systems somewhere else.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
An ADSL line is divided up into multiple 4KHz bands, each one carrying either 33.6kbit up, or 33.6kbit down. That's what the "Asymmetric" means: each band is either upload or download, but not both. Cable is exactly the same. On a normal ADSL1 connection, the bottom portion of the frequencies will be set aside for upload, and the top will be set aside for download, and you can definitely upload at the same time as download. Usually you can't get nearly as fat a pipe as you can with cable (though in some are
Re: (Score:2)
Re:As long as it's Adsl I don't want it (Score:4, Interesting)
I briefly had ADSL and it was crap compared to cable modem. People forget the ASYMMETRIC part of DSL. In my usage I really felt this when using the net. Lots of lags etc. I switched to a cable modem and it was night and day better in my usage. Granted this was many years ago so perhaps it's better now?
Interesting. You'll find that most gamers MUCH prefer DSL over cable, since you're heading into a central hub and get right on to the fiber, rather than sharing a typically oversubscribed local node.
I currently have VDSL, fiber to the VRAD, and it's the best I've ever had for gaming. That kinda surprises me, actually.
Not necessiarly (Score:3, Insightful)
For gaming, all that matters is ping. You need little bandwdith by today's standards. I've yet to see any evidence that DSL is reliably lower ping than cable. I know it can be much high ping, I've had that myself. When I was with Speakeasy, they actually switched the connection up to Seattle before the first hop. There are DSL switches, just like Ethernet, and Covad switched it up there for them. A low ping to a site for me was 150ms with that connection. Compare that to my current cable connection which pi
This is Frick'n great.. (Score:2)
And yet with AT&T's awesome service, I can only get 768Kbps. Thank goodness they have great customer support... [sarcasm]
Docsis 3 (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
It hasn't done so yet....:)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm currently signed up for Comcast's new 50/10 Docsis 3.0 connection. I get a constant 50 Mbit on Bittorrent with bursts up to 70 Mbit. Upload bursts to 20 Mbit and provides reliable 10 Mbit speeds. Not bad for cable. I am told that there are no data caps in my area but I won't know for sure for a few months :P.
However, FiOS still has better upload speeds and no download caps. Verizon offers 35/35 (around 43/35 in practice) in most of its service areas for $100/mo. or $115 with its ultimate HD package.
Re: (Score:2)
Comcast is moving towards caps of 250GB/month in all markets. At least I get a snazzy meter in my Comcast account page to see how much of my quota I've used.
Re: (Score:2)
Most cable companies will sell you a static IP on a business account. A lot of telcos have the same policy.
Re: (Score:2)
Most cable companies will sell you a static IP on a business account. A lot of telcos have the same policy.
I tried that with Optus in Australia. It was no-go. They weren't interested in giving me a static IP so I moved to ADSL from comcen.
Re: (Score:2)
Great... (Score:3, Funny)
Sigh. (Score:2)
I'm now living in a major urban metropolis and I've got the same crappy DSL internet that I had in rural Canada in 1995. 5mbps. On that basis I conclude that whatever the powers-that-be are doing to stimulate innovation, it's been a failure. Utterly. Sigh.
Re: (Score:2)
And I'm in a rural area in the middle of nowhere and we have 5mbps over cable. Sigh.
The we can exceed the AUP in just a few minutes. (Score:2)
Most ISPs like to sell speed and hope that you dont use it much.
Re: (Score:2)
It gets even better. For about $40/month I'm getting a 10Mbps DSL. So, for 825Mbps I'm looking at paying $3300.00/month. What a fucking value! Suddenly, paying $.10 for a text message seems reasonable. I won't pay it, but more reasonable for sure.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
And with a 25 GB cap, you'll get several seconds on full-on internet!
Re: (Score:2)
We still have to bend over, take it, and say thank you to our local (well, heck... AT&T) phone companies for the PRIVILEGE of having 8megabit/s downstream.... Competition anyone? or are we just such mindless sheep that "it's good enough, 'cause my granddaddy only had the pony express"
Argh....
I guess I'm one of the lucky ones. I have both Comcast (blecch!), U-Verse and SBC DSL in my area. Consequently (having tried the others and suffered) I have U-Verse running at 12-mbit/sec for $45/month. I could add a few bucks and go back up to the 18 mbit tier, but this is sufficient for my needs (the occasional torrent and a girlfriend who loves streaming movies.)
So yeah, I certainly agree with you. Competition is good. I used to use that when I had Comcast: when dealing with their (ahem!) "customer se
Re: (Score:2)
I could add a few bucks and go back up to the 18 mbit tier, but this is sufficient for my needs (the occasional torrent and a girlfriend who loves streaming movies.)
DIRTY LIES! PICS or it didn't happen!
P.S. OOO pasting in slashdot is fixed in chromium 8!!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Their methodology requires multiple phone lines bonded and being used with parity in order obtain these speeds.
Most houses dont have multiple phone lines
Actually every house I have been in (this is in Australia) has had at least two pairs. My current house has two separate cables, each with two pair. Though that doesn't mean the infrastructure can deliver two pairs end to end.
Re: (Score:2)
Best to roll out optical.