DSL - Holy friggin crap

I just got DSL installed on a temporary 30 day period deal at my house…I just have one thing to say.
Jesus Christ.
This is the fastest way I have accessed the internet ever. It took me 2.24 seconds to sign on to AOL. I timed it.
It took me 1.13 mins to download a 3.7 MB file.

I am in awe.

-foxy

They say cable modem is even quicker. I’ve only used cable, so I can’t make a direct comparison, but I’ve had bursts of speed in the megabits per second range while downloading multiple files simultaneously. (thats the total bandwidth, not per file)

The damn things been unreliable lately though, it was down last night and all this morning.

Yes welcome to a better place. I was connecting at 24k at my house up until a few months ago. After years of yelling at Verizon, we finally got it installed, and thats pretty much how I felt. At 1500k, downloading megs is a matter of seconds now.

The only bad part is I’ve connected at work high speed for years, so the novelty wasn’t new to me.

Now go watch some movie trailers :smiley:

Yep cable is faster but is far more unreliable. With DSL you pretty much get your own pipe, but with cable the more people on it, the less “pressure” you get.

A good friend of mine was a beta site for the local cable company, she got megabit transfers at lightspeed, then it went live and the speed dropped. Only a little at first, but now it’s almost unusable between 7-10pm. :frowning: I have DSL and never get up to a megabit speed, but it’s pretty much constant at .68mbps 24/7. :smiley:

Goto dslreports.com and run some of the tweaks. Depending on which OS you use (older is better for this, as new ones will already have the tweaks you are about to make), you may add some speed.

You have DSL and you’re logging on to AOL???

That’s like taking a Ferrari to the landfill.

AOL has their own DSL solution. Really you’re better off going through your local phone company, rather than a third party. That’s what I did.

AOL has their own DSL solution. Really you’re better off going through your local phone company, rather than a third party. That’s what I did.

When I said my cable modem was down, I didn’t mean the speed was down, I meant it was totally non-functional. When it works, I never really noticed slowdowns.

There was a tech guy in my place yesterday futzing with my home’s cable splitters, and seemed to fix it for a few hours. But then it was down last night and this morning. That might have been fixed though; my TV cable service stopped working for a few minutes, then when it came back both my TV and cable modem were up. I scheduled the guy to come back tomorrow to look at it some more.

It isn’t really accurate to say that “DSL is faster than cable” or “cable is faster than DSL” I don’t know how consistant cable connections are, but DSL has many levels.

I went to Covad’s site and found these:

(the residential ones don’t give exact numbers for the up/down speed. They dumb it down for the folks at home)
$39.95/mo 7x Faster Downloads & over 2x Faster Uploads ["faster means faster than 56k dialup]
$49.95/mo 28x Faster Downloads & over 2x Faster Uploads

the “small office” packages are a little more specific:
**$69.95/mo ** 1.5 download 384 upload
$192/mo ** SDSL 144/144
** $369/mo
SDSL 1.5/1.5

So you pretty much get what you pay for. Pay more = faster.

I want to switch from cable to DSL. I’d probably get the 1.5/384 one. It’s cheaper than the cable we have now!

My old RCA cable modem died slowly… I called AT&T about six times in three months only to get a blithe “there are no service outages in your area, sir.” every time it stopped working and somehow reconnected a few hours later.

Fortunately, I’d had the foresight to rent the hardware instead of purchasing it, so the replacement unit (a different brand, I think it’s Motorola) was free.

The cost is high (they’ve hiked it twice) but the telecommuting flexibility it offers me is worth way more to me than the cash.

I got DSL in December and will not return to dialup. It is so nice, everything is right there really fast. It is faster than my hard drive for the most part.