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DSL Rising
Steve wrote to us with an
article about the rise of DSL throughout the world. What I find most interesting is the discussion about cable vs. DSL; in the United States cable is winning, but globally, DSL holds the cake.
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Many areas of the US can't get DSL service due to their distance from the phone company central office. So they are left with no choice but to get cable, if it's availible.
I fell into this category, as even though DSL was availible in my town (a suburb outside of NYC), I was wayyyy too far from the central office to get DSL. Only just recently did my local cable supplier begin offering broadband.
In smaller countries with more concentrated populations, more people live within the appropriate distance from the central office. Hence the larger amount of people with DSL service.
Cable was too restrictive. Sure, the speed is better in my neck of the woods, but choice matters more to me.
With DSL, in Portland, OR at least, I get to choose from a number of different speeds and ISP's.
For me this is the difference between a *real* connection to the Internet, and a download only one.
(Shameless plug --If you do not live here, skip!)
www.spiretech.com
- Shell account on server via SSH or (gasp!) telnet.
- Some level of free web site hosting.
- Good connectivity
- Only real user restriction is that you do not abuse the connection. So running a commercial site is out, but all the hobby level stuff is ok.
- IP address by username in dns. Not static, but very useful. eg: user_name@dsl.spiretech.com
These things matter a lot to me. I use my home connection for many different activities. Many are related to my job, but some are just for learning.
So, you basically trade choice and connectivity for speed. For me that's fine. Maybe others see the same?
Blogging because I can...
I believe that more people in the US use cable rather than DSL due to the distance limitations of DSL. Since the population of America is so widely dispersed over a vast land, I think that cable becomes more practical. However, in places like Western Europe and Asia, DSL becomes more practical due to a very dense population. Nevertheless, I think DSL will hit it off big in the major cities and metropolitan areas of America. Cable will make it in more rural areas.
I think the majority of the problem is the DSL providers making it HELL to use. Mostly the Bells trying to control their network by installing their sh*t all over your computer, giving you USB modems that suck, and generally giving crappy service. I had an excellent small time DSL provider that gave me INCREDIBLE service without the headaches and I would go back to them in a heartbeat, but the bells are completely worthless from day 1. Cable on the other hand almost always use ethernet modems from my experience and don't tend to install much if any special software on your PCs and don't hassle you as much...
just my experience and $.02
--DarkFrog
If the dead rise again, we're going to have some serious population control issues.
My DSL has DHCP, an accessible IP, has a small cable I plug into the phone socket which isn't exactly much.
Oh and Cable isn't in my area. In most of Europe Satellite TV rules the roost, except for major cities and even there Sat tends to have an edge. Europe didn't spend the 50s,60s and 70s installing a cable TV network, it went straight from terrestrial to Satellite. This means that the only network that is EVERYWHERE is the Phone network hence DSL.
So you'd want DSL if you were in a place where the investment in the Phone infrastructure has been going for the 40 years that cable investment has been going in the US.
This is why no-one is suprised (except the Slashdot editor) that Cable is big in the US and DSL big everywhere else. Its sort of like saying "Hey look CDMA is big in the US but GSM is big everywhere else".
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
All the local ISPs in my area are selling DSL. I guess they are just re-selling Pac Bell's DSL...is that your point?
Yes. Local ISPs (like the one I work for) make little to no profit on resold DSL. If they make any profit per connection at all, it's because they charge more than the phone company does for the same service.
Ironically, that usually means they still make no profit.
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
Two main reasons
1) Network topology. Cable is a ring, so all the consumers are sharing the bandwidth, the local connection forms the bottle neck. xDSL is star, each customer has exclusive use until the backbone. It suffers less contention. This benefits the consumer.
2) Cost. Cable expensive to install, you need to install a new cable ring and new run to each subscriber. XDSL operate of the existing twisted copper pair of the local loop. This benefits the ISP.
AIH, We are rolling out a broadband Interactive DTV using IP over ADSL because of these advantage.
Well, that's just your DSL provider. There are DSL providers that truely do rock. Well, there WERE until DirecttvDSL closed down.
:(
Now, I suppose it's Speakeasy or nothing. That is, if you can get Speakeasy in your area. I personally can't.
As for Cable, in my area, Cable ISN'T faster. It's horribly slow. They won't give a static IP. The upstream is only 128k (though you won't ever even send THAT much because their network sucks). As if that weren't bad enough, it's nearly impossible to keep connections to servers active for long. They know about the problems, and they don't care. Gaming? Don't even try it. File sharing? It'll take you forever. Forget about streaming unless you don't mind serious lag.
As if all that wasn't enough, they offer three packages (silver, gold, and platinum) and from what I've been told by people who work there, anyone who gets gold or platinum is wasting their money as the network is too slow to give them even what silver promises.
I realize of course that not all cable providers are like this. What makes you think all DSL providers are as bad as the one you had?
Telocity/DirectTvDSL kicked ass. But Bellsouth in my area sucks. They suck the same way it sounds like your DSL provider sucks. In the end it comes down to who you use. In my case, I have nobody reliable left to use.
I vote against shitty service by not spending my money on it. I guess I'll be offline for a while.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
Verizon DSL has DHCP, and is dirt simple to setup. The phone filters are also easy as cake to install if you have the phone network in your house setup properly. If you split the lines coming out of the access point into "computer room" and "the rest", you simply install a filter on "the rest", and possibly one more onto whatever phone you want in the computer room, you're good to go.
;-) Actually, i remember a couple years ago PPPoE was the dominate way to connect, and it was hell to get setup if you couldn't use the cd that it came with, however the telco's have wised up that it's more of a PITA to deal with it, than to just let people plug in, and let the default settings of windows/mac's take over. "Shut down, plug in, start up" and you get a DHCP lease is pretty failsafe for the average Joe.
The only companies i've seen using PPPoE (via WinPoET) recently, are AOLDSL. Are you admitting to using AOLDSL?
One thing that I like about DSL over cable (having used both in my area) is that the latency of the DSL is better. I think most people are probably more latency sensitive than bandwidth sensitive. When you are clicking links, you want that instant feedback.
Wake up and smell the coffee.. You've been throttled back to 120K/sec just like me and many other cable customers over the past year or two.
You have some points wrong:
"is because the U.S is NOT densly populated. For example, Europe is extremely dense in population thus make DSL an easy choice with many people close to the relay stations (within 3 miles). Where as in the U.S. you have mountains, deserts, artic tundra where lower population live so they must use cable."
Population density in Finland is lower than in US, still ADSL is pretty popular here. I believe that majority of population in US lives in cities (>100000) cities, thus mountains, deserts and artic tundra won't make big difference.
"Also, much of Europe and Asia use satelite for television so people don't have the option to use the exist co-ax that is running into their homes as almost all have in the U.S (for Internet access)."
At least in Finland this isn't true, Internet connection via cable modem is available in all major cities.
Reason for ADSL success is it's stability:
With cable modem you will get fluctuating 50-500ms ping in Online games with 10-60% packet loss. This is totally unplayble.
With ADSL you will get stable 90% of Finland's land area (and >95% of population) was covered by GSM network by 1998. As I pointed earlier Finland has lower population density compared to US.
Top five for those who are too lazy to click:
(country, DSL-lines in 1000, lines per 100 population)
- South-Korea, 6076, 12.7
- USA, 5837, 2.0
- Japan, 4223, 3.3
- Germany, 2800, 3.4
- China, 2220, 0.2
Numbers are supposely from september, but I know that Germany is at >3000000 lines right now, so maybe they're not too accurate (or Germany's market is growing real fast...Look out for China, it'll lead this ranking soon, just because of being HUGE.
As someone who has used both DSL and cable, I'd have to say cable wins hand down.
My story:
1 year of DSL on the Ryhthms (now defunct) network on a 128k link, then a year of Cable (ATT Broadband), now I'm back to DSL (last 10 months or so) with a Covad 144k link.
3 different services because I've lived in 3 different places in the last ~3 years.
My first bought with DSL occured because Cable wasn't available in my area, nor was Verizon DSL. The only thing I could get at home was a business DSL line from Ryhtms (128 up and down) for $100.00 a month. Install went smooth (1 month after ordering) and I had 5 static IPs. I didn't have the bandwidth to run much in the way of servers, but I was able to host my own DNS for some other projects. Service went down probably 2 full days a month. Not too bad, but it wasn't great.
Then I moved to the next town over. They had ATT Broadband. $49.00 a month. I must have been the only one on my segment using the broadband feature, because I could have 3 or 4 downloads going at once at speeds up to 700k. I also had a static DHCP host name, and had no trouble SSH'ing into my boxes remotely (I used a netgear 311 router/gateway and had 4 machines behind it).
Well, the girlfriend didn't like where we were living, so we moved after a year back to the town that had no cable broadband.Rhythms had just gone out of business, and I was back in 56k land.
After a month of research for a faster connection, the best I found was a Covad business connection (144 up and down) for $149.00 a month for 5 static IPs.(again, not really the bandwidth for runny and kind of a server, but static IPs can be useful) Install happened a week after I ordered and went fairly smoothly.
In the ~10 months I've had Covad, they have been back no less than 6 times to fix the connection. I'd say it was down 4 full days a month, especially if we have any major rainstorms.
With cable, I never had a problem, it was up 100% of the time, was much cheaper, and a lot faster. Of course, if I lived closer to a Central Office, I could get better DSL service at a cheaper price, but I don't...
However, my prayers were recently ordered and they just finished upgrading my part of town with the new digital cable lines. We have digital cable TV, and as soon as the year contract expires on the DSL, I'll be switching over to ATT Broadband once again.
--
A while ago /. told me that DSL was losing out. I was surprised, I thought DSL was a winning technology that all those P2P junkies couldn't live without. (and hey, who wouldn't want his downloads go 24 times as fast as others downloading from your box?) Now they are telling me that DSL is winning. Surprise again. ``But they said...'' Turns out DSL is winning over cable everywhere, except in the USA. (No surprise here, the USA usually has it different from the rest of the world.) I don't know about other places, but I know that in the Netherlands cable is painfully slow in many places, which may or may not be related to pretty much literally *everyone* having cable TV. I just could imagine the signals interfering, leading to limited bandwidth. I might be talking out of my head here, though. At any rate I know that normal phone communications don't interfere with xDSL because the xDSL signals are modulated (the xDSL signal does cause a noise on the phone line that is massively annoying to humans and destructive to modem communications).
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Install ONE filter at your external connection point, on your second line.
All your outlets should be wired to your second line.
Your DSL modem is connected to your primary line.
(or vice versa).
At least that's how I did it.
Then get a Linksys router and don't use the PPPOE software.
Do those things, and DSL is better than cable, AND most DSL companies aren't nearly as restrictive as far as ports and quotas and such. AND you're not sharing your connection with every other joker in your neighborhood, (and they're not sniffing your line, or hacking into your system).
All in all, DSL is way better than cable in every way.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I personally don't care which is technologically better (Cable or DSL). In the precise location of where I live, I do not qualify for DSL. End of story.
I have cable and it rocks. I get about 4.2 to 5.7 megabits per second downstream from my ISP which is on an internet backbone and it never dips below that. My ping times are also rock bottom - I play Battlefield 1942 on EA's servers and get ping times of low 60's. My cable provider is Cable America. The time from when I requested service to the time I actually had service was probably 30 hours. It cost me nothing (no install fees) and I pay monthly (no forced yearly agreement). So to sum up: I have static ip, 4.0+ mbps downstream, 512 kbps upstream, all for $35 a month.
DSL? I can't even get it, and even if I could, I'd be paying a hell of a lot more for the same speeds.
As much as I hate to give them Kudos, I've had little to no trouble with Verizon DSL here on the east coast. Granted I don't use their PPPoE software (it was a little flakey) -- at one time I was using a linux box as a router, now I'm using a Linksys WAP router -- but the actual service with "Non Shit" PPPoE drivers is as steady as a rock. It maybe drops once a week (if that). Sure, its not as fast as my friends cable modem, but there are no restrictions on how I use it either. I have 5 machines hanging of the line, can run my web/imap server and VPN to work without violating any retarded TOS agreement. I've been damn happy with them.
Mostly because Comcast or whoever it is that does cable here these days doesn't offer internet serrvice. So I enjoy my relatively problem-free DSL, which is just as fast downloading as the cable modem I had when living in another city (150 KB/sec, same for both of them). Of course it is PPoE, so no web hosting or anything, but then DSL is too slow upstream to be of much use for this anyway (aside from an email server, anyway).
It was much easier to install than Cable was, for me anyway; I don't know about most people, but I have only one cable outlet in my house (nowhere near my computers), but many phone outlets. Makes it much easier for installing the modem where I want it. And I have a nice 10bT modem, as I recall SBC offerred a choice between that and a USB one.
And who was complaining about the little line filters? Dude, it takes like two minutes total to put one in every phone jack in the house, and they don't cause any problems whatsoever - faxes, phones, even regular modems work fine through them.
Cable would be nice if I wanted to do some hosting, but it isn't available in my area (the cable co. claims they would need to install all new equipment, which they are apparently unwilling to do, never mind the fact that I live in a college town of about 60,000 that would probably have a rather high demand for this sort of thing) so I am more than happy with my DSL. It is certainly enough to download things at high speeds, play games, and do work on the internet, and since this is 99% of what I want to do, it is perfect for me. Sure, it goes down for a couple hours every other month or so, but that really isn't too much of a problem.