Still good here bouncing between 1 and 1.2MB/s.It's primetime here
too. Not to bad for nintey-bucks a month that includes full cable TV.
I saw mine go up to about 70kilobyte/sec, which is about all I've a
right to expect with my DSL.
http://i42.tinypic.com/2m7fbdt.png
I feel for you. For a month here they were doing upgrades, my
connection reverted to dial-up. It took me almost two hours to
download the NET framework update.
On the plus side my speed doubled from 5Mb to 10Mb sometimes better
then ten. They now have some ridiculously high speed packages
availible.10Mb is good enough it's not to often I can even max that
out. Even MS update site is only useing about half of it.
The only downside to cable is the upload is only 512kb.
Cable folks want about US$3000 to run the line here. That's from the
road to the house (they have already wired up everyone in my area --
except this house.) Apparently, the original owner many years back
refused to get cable, wasn't wired up at the time when they offered,
and so now they won't consider doing anything here without my paying
for the 1/4 mile of cable it takes to get from the road to the house.
(Rain forest woods, here.) I don't blame them for the expensive offer
-- it will cost them a fair piece of change -- but it's not something
I'm willing to consider paying that much for. So neither of us want
to pay the bills for a cable line and there we sit.
Phone company has offered a better box (they say) than the old DSL
modem they originally gave me in 2002. However, their new device is a
combined modem and router and, frankly, I already went to hell and
back getting things nicely set up as it is. I'd be fine with
replacing just the modem, but the idea of getting rid of the router I
have now and having to figure out the new one they sent is something I
may have to wait a while on, too. No manual on it... nothing. Not
even a cheat sheet, included. Just a box, some foam, the modem/router
and a pretty picture on a piece of paper included in the box. They
say it might pop up to 1.5 megabit/sec.
The original work I saw on ADSL (I think the line cards for Verizon
use ADSL) was some 256 separate bands and the ability to handle from 3
megabit to 8 megabit, depending on distance to the CO. That was back
in the 1990's, sometime. I've been told the line cards are capable of
8 megabit, anyway. They should be able to get me better than where
I'm at... but they don't.
Fiber will be a while coming out here. With the _average_ property
size being 5 acres here and many of them (like mine) much larger, and
with business down as it is, I'm not expecting them to jump at the
chance to run miles of fiber per house for a few ten-spots a month.
Mostly likely, we'll see fiber here only when the remaining folks at
the phone company who know anything about copper wire dies or retires
and the young kids they hire whodon't know anything other than fiber
refuse to work on the copper lines and they are forced into it.
Jon
