[OT] Re: DSL Coming -- I may need help! : My ranting :)

From: John Wilson <wilson_at_dbit.dbit.com>
Date: Tue Feb 29 01:15:07 2000

On Mon, Feb 28, 2000 at 10:09:48PM -0800, Bruce Lane wrote:
> Also, I have to wonder about something. If everything you say is true, you
> are implying also that DSL service stinks. If that's truly the case, why
> has it become such a runaway success?

(I don't have DSL but...) I think the point is that the quality varies and
there are no guarantees. I have a friend who moved to Ann Arbor, MI, a
year or so ago (since moved on to Redmond, WA, the horror!) and he went out
of his way to choose an apartment based on it being in a DSL service area.
Apparently for the first several months he had the line, it was *far* slower
than a dialup modem connection. There was just something freakishly wrong
with it, but it did eventually get the bytes through so of course, he still
had to pay his bill. Eventually the phone co. tweaked something and got
decent performance out of it but he wasn't too happy.

I have Road Runner here (the Albany NY area was one of the test markets so
we got it way early, our payback seems to be, no DSL even though everyone
else in the world has that already), and it's another one of these things
with wonderful theoretical max numbers, but the real-life numbers are all
over the place. Sometimes I can get 200 KByte/second FTP speeds, other
times it's so slow that my telnet connections drop. And I love the fact
that when I connect from my home Linux box to dbit.com, the connection
goes from here, to Boston, to New Jersey, then finally to dbit.com which
is located at the ISP two blocks from my house. So I guess they're too
cheap to make *real* routing deals.

John Wilson
D Bit
Received on Tue Feb 29 2000 - 01:15:07 GMT