Grandma's Phone, DSL, and the Copper They Share (hackaday.com)

szczys writes: DSL is high-speed Internet that uses the same twisted pair of copper wire that still works with your Grandmother's wall-mounted telephone. How is that possible? The short answer is that the telephone company is cheating. But the long answer delves into the work of Claude Shannon, who figured out how much data could be reliably transferred using a given medium. His work, combined with that of Harry Nyquist and Ralph Hartley (pioneers of channel capacity and the role noise plays in these systems), brings the Internet Age to many homes on an infrastructure that has been in use for more than a hundred years.

Comments

Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[Anonymous Coward]

Not everyone lives in a city. Even places that have "broadband" have pockets where DSL is the only option.

Just because you live in Seattle and have gigabit fiber doesn't mean the rest of the world does.

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[szczys]

It's not a judgement on your method of communication, but a recognition that a telephone from 80 years ago will still work on the same system. Remarkable.

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[seven of five]

Not everyone lives in a city.

I live in Chicago, in a GOOD neighborhood, and our options are cable and DSL. This "fiber" you speak of has not yet found its way to our particular back water.

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[shaitand]

Actually it won't. Not unless your grandmas phone was touch tone and 80 years ago it certainly wasn't.

Re: Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[slazzy]

I still keep a landline for emergency, it's never failed in 40 years.

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[Dcnjoe60]

Actually it won't. Not unless your grandmas phone was touch tone and 80 years ago it certainly wasn't.

You may not be able to place calls with a rotary phone any more, but you certainly can receive them. The system still works, its just the dialing methods have changed.

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[jareth-0205]

You may not be able to place calls with a rotary phone any more, but you certainly can receive them. The system still works, its just the dialing methods have changed.

Actually you can, atleast in the UK. Pulse dialling is still supported by the national phone provider.

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[Anonymous Coward]

Not quite. Pulse dialing still works where I live.. and in fact there's an old rotary phone tucked away on a wall in one of the buildings at the university I work at and it still dials just fine. I'm guessing it's hooked into the old copper and not tied into the VoIP setup, but I thought they had moved all things to the VoIP network and cut the copper...

Either way, it works.

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[Anonymous Coward]

You actually can place calls with a rotary phone, you just use an electronic contact book that produced the tone sounds (or impulsions). These were common in the 90s, I guess nowadays you can find smartphone applications doing the same.

Re: Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[Anonymous Coward]

I still keep a landline for emergency, it's never failed in 40 years.

Yes it has, plenty of times, you just didn't happen to notice because you weren't trying to use it at that time.
And even if the local loop stayed up, I guarantee that long distance trunks have filled up or dropped plenty of times without you being aware.

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[omnichad]

You could still play DTMF tones through the handset to dial the call, so it's just an extra tool required to place calls.

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[damaki]

You can in France too.

Re: Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[avgjoe62]

And even if the local loop stayed up, I guarantee that long distance trunks have filled up or dropped plenty of times without you being aware

Even if the long distance trunks did drop, how is that the fault of the OP's landline? After Hurricane Wilma, when cell phone towers were either down or overwhelmed or had no power, my landline was still working. A lot of my neighbors had to borrow my phone. I even gave my next door neighbor an old handset to use at his house - he had DSL and his landline worked, but he didn't have a plain old telephone.

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[lukpac]

Actually it won't. Not unless your grandmas phone was touch tone and 80 years ago it certainly wasn't.

As long as grandma's phone didn't predate direct dialing, plenty of phone systems still support pulse dialing.

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[shaitand]

For an 80 year old phone it half works, for a 20 year old phone it completely works, but there isn't any particular reason we'd want it to still work.

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

I guarantee the US can, too, as it's all computers now.

My dad refused to give up his rotary (a phone company rental bakelite black, at that) because the phone company continued to want to charge extra for "premium" touch tone service, even long after it was actually a drag on them.

Last time I had a land line, around 2010, it was rotary-only, so whenever I had to use a menu, as to pay a bill, after dialing I would switch the phone to touch tone.

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[shaitand]

Interesting, not sure where the UK or France come into it but still interesting trivia.

Re: Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish I could get DSL. No broadband is available in my neighborhood in California.

Re: Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[shaitand]

Then you neighbor wasn't aware of VOIP or the evils of net neutrality have kicked and the telco is making voip services suck. If you have functional internet you should have voice communication, including the option of termination to phone #. If that fails in a truly epic disaster, that's why we all have radios.

Re: Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[Anonymous Coward]

It's more likely that since you don't use your phone all that often that you've simply never noticed the times that it was unavailable. POTS systems are reliable, but they are not perfect.

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[Anonymous Coward]

For an 80 year old phone it half works, for a 20 year old phone it completely works, but there isn't any particular reason we'd want it to still work.

for when you can't charge your "phone" that does everything, but runs out of battery the minute you have to take a call?

Re: Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[Jeremi]

I still keep a landline for emergency, it's never failed in 40 years.

Of course, the flip side of that is that you're likely paying a significant monthly bill to keep that reliable land line active.

My building's two front-door call boxes were each using a land line for their call-up function, and they were costing the HOA $65/month each. I switched them over to VOIP, now they cost the HOA about 25 cents per month each (not including the $23/month DSL service, since we had that set up anyway for unrelated reasons).

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[sims 2]

We have to dial 1 to make a long distance call and have to dial the area code even for local calls but pulse dialing still works here in oklahoma.

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[shaitand]

Yes but lets be clear, there is no technical or practical barrier to keeping you that fiber. Fiber links span the globe are work over ridiculously long range. There isn't even a practical or technical barrier keeping it from most places called the last mile. The true last mile is nowhere in the continental US it's the arctic and at sea even there nothing is actually blocking long flying fleets of blimps delivering wireless that can provide much lower latency links than Sat connections.

The problems aren't technical, they aren't even financial, the problems are major providers splitting the nation in such a way that there are only two at most in any particular place competing as minimally as possible and with as little overlap as possible because there is a higher profit in splitting the map than a race to max service for bottom pricing. Why upgrade infrastructure when people have no choice but to buy what you are selling for what has become an essential commodity?

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[Anonymous Coward]

There are pulse to tone converters on the market to use old stuff to connect to new ATAs that don't support pulse.

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[I-am-a-Banana]

To add to what others have said you can still make calls. I have two rotaries at home that can still dial out. :)

Re: Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[avgjoe62]

We both had DSL. Neither of us had "functional internet". POTS still worked, but my neighbor didn't realize he could use the phone line even if the internet didn't work.

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure where the assumption that the US is all that matters comes into it either, but here we are.

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[NJRoadfan]

Pulse dialing still works here with Verizon FiOS Digital Voice.

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[bmo]

Not unless your grandmas phone was touch tone

Pulse dialing still works nearly everywhere. Indeed, some people are skilled enough to do pulse dialing by flashing the hook the required number of times.

Like me.

Get on my level.

--
BMO

HOWTO: http://www.oldskoolphreak.com/...

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[sjames]

In many places in the U.S., pulse dialing still works.

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[jbengt]

The true last mile is nowhere in the continental US it's the arctic and at sea . . .

I don't think "the last mile" means what you think it means.

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[Toshito]

I don't know where you live, but here in Canada me and my father tried a 30 years old rotary phone on his landline a month ago and it worked perfectly, to our amazement.

But I have serious doubts it would work on my "land" line, since it's really just a cell base station with a SIM card.

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, some people are skilled enough to do pulse dialing by flashing the hook the required number of times.

Yes, I used to do this 40 years ago when UK phone charges were sky high and parental dial locks were common. Didn't really take much skill, just a little practice and guessing that zero was ten taps.

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[Mryll]

It was a great trick for getting a call out from the occasional phone in a semi-public location intended for answer-only with no dialing mechanism.

Re: Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, you're paying for RELIABILITY.

For front door call boxes, who cares? For reliability of a home phone, that's another matter.

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[Anonymous Coward]

For a brief period I lived in a house with fibre to the home. So we got VoIP, and just for fun I got myself a dial-gizmo (converts pulse to tone dial) and plugged in my 40s era Bakelite rotary dial phone.

And it worked. 70 year tech gap and it just worked. *That* is what I call backwards compatibility.

(And most importantly it annoyed some of my new tech obsessed friends. I love how the mere thought of "old" tech makes them all twitchy)

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[Anonymous Coward]

It depends. Many (in my experience most) exchanges still do pulse dial just fine, but some do not. For example my vintage rotary dial works in my current house, whereas at my previous house I needed a dial-gizmo to convert pulse to tone dial. But then again my previous place had fibre to the home and hence VoIP, so that's not really a fair comparison.

(Mind you pulse almost certainly won't talk to the menu tree of whatever company you're calling. For that... did I mention dial-gizmo often enough :)

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[shaitand]

The phrase is sort of used in two ways. As I used above, to refer to connectivity to less populated areas and to refer to the final leg to the premise... Obviously there is nothing prohibiting running fiber directly to the premise, there is fiber terminating on premise at my home right now.

Generally speaking, when people are talking about limits on broadband in the US we are talking about later as applied to the former. There isn't even a beginning to a valid excuse for a Telco not having fiber on "the last mile" in every residence in a densely populated area.

Verizon firmly established that it was easily accomplished with FIOS the map splitting I mentioned above is why everyone else hasn't needed to do the same to be competitive. While FIOS provides a low latency and stable connection up to 500mbps. In the same token, the reason 500mbps is so expensive from Verizon is also that same map splitting (combined with Verizon polymorphing between being a phone company and ISP depending on what regulations suit them). Instead of multiple providers competing on that fiber infrastructure driving the prices down and the speeds up (500 is an arbitrary cap) Verizon simply has to beat one competitor at most in any given area.

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[Darinbob]

The phone lines are also broadband in a sense. The DSL doesn't have to travel far, just up to the closest phone company station. So they don't have to stay within the narrower band used by voice but can use most of the bandwidth of the twisted pair. Thus it's "broad" band, or at least "broader" band relative to POTS. Of course you have to worry about other problems as well than just the band width, the old telephone wires have lots of junctions and branches even within a house and so it has to deal with reflections. And sometimes there may not be twisted pair inside the home but parallel wires instead.

Today many people define broadband in terms of speed and because basic ADSL is so much slower than high end ISP offerings it's possible to forget that it's also broadband. Such as how many people interchangeably use "bandwidth" to mean end-to-end speed even though that's not accurate. Of course what "broad" means can vary.

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[Darinbob]

But literally the *same* wires inside the house have been used for pre-rotary dialing as well as DSL. Though of course DSL speeds depend a lot on quality of wires outside the home.

Re: Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[Darinbob]

Most modern phones require external power now. Even the cordless phones will have a base station that needs to be plugged in. If you really want back up service in an outtage it might be handy to have an older phone in storage.

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[KGIII]

There is a town in Maine that, not too many years ago, still had a human operator that did worked at a switchboard. It was a bit of a modernized board but it was kept around for quite a while just to for the historical aspect. It has since been eliminated, it was a tiny tourist town with something like 30 full-time residents. There was a bit of fanfare when it closed as it was the last one in the world.

That said, I've mentioned this before, I have DSL. I paid to get the lines put in and for them to add a CO so that the signal would reach. It also enabled my neighbors to get online and the folks past me chipped in a bit to repay me for paying for the last mile's wire to their house. The telco gave me a pretty good deal on it and I only had to pay for the materials. I've since looked and it looks like I paid about the right amount for the parts.

Anyhow, I elected to use DSL for a reason. For close to the same amount of money, I could have have had the cable company run cable out. They'll do it if you pay them the installation fee. They were right around the same price. However, I still went with DSL and I'm usually *really* happy that I made that choice. As it's over the phone line, it has some added legal protections and the PUC has some teeth. Maine's PUC isn't all that bad, actually.

I've had regular speed increases though I think I'm at a limit right now. I've never paid an increased rate. I have three, physically distinct, business class lines but pay the residential rate. They give me hardware but I never use it - even though they make repeated requests and offer to send an installer out to help me out. I get 14-15 down and 1.5 up. I'm not home but I've used some ~250 GB of bandwidth on one line. I've one that does nothing but run torrents. The normal monthly usage for the first one mentioned? That's often up in the TB range. It is sometimes higher.

If my ISP bugs me, I can call and get a new one tomorrow. They have to provide service, pretty much a little bit above cost, to any company that is willing to "service" my area. I've tested this and used an out of State ISP before. I can have multiple ISPs at one time - I've done so by accident. If I switch, my service switches seamlessly. As it is the phone line, they're obligated to best effort repairs. I've had trees knock my lines down - on the ground, multiple times, and I still have reasonable throughput.

I torrent all day, every day, to some pretty insane levels of traffic. They've never said a word - if they did, I'd boot them to the curb. I can get an ISP in Hong Kong (really) if I want, so long as they're willing to provide my support and pay a part of their payment to the telephone company. I'm not home but I'm still torrenting everything - sometimes I stream it to my current location. I keep a documentary streaming nearly 24/7. I have three static IP addresses that I don't pay for - they'll give me three more and I can have multiple IP addresses pointing at the same line. At the same time, I can change my IP address manually and get a new one almost instantly.

I've tried a few different ISPs but the results are much the same. I stick with Fairpoint as they give me the business class for residential pricing as I'm the line owner, so to speak. At least I understand that's the reasoning. However, I've gotten pissed at 'em before and kicked them to the curb, putting them in the penalty box for a year seems to really improve customer service. It's a small area but I don't just have a local billing office - I have a fully authorized service agent who's also an engineer and does on-site stuff if I need something (I don't). However, I have his office phone number and he's in there M-F from 8-5 (hour lunch). Sometimes there's someone else in his office, physically. He has all the power but he's a level 2 tech. I know both of their names and go in and see them at the office. I bring them coffee and donuts and they've both been to my house while not on company time.

I could go on... But, yeah... When I read the Comcast, AT

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[KGIII]

That's kind of amusing. My home's 24 miles from the village and like 60-something from a town. But the village is getting fiber which means they'll be coming partway down the highway leading to my house. It's not a certainty, yet... But, I'm told there's a "good chance" that I'll have fiber available by this autumn. They're not removing the copper so (and I know this may sound odd) I'll probably just keep the DSL.

When a tree falls on copper, it usually still works. That's not true with fiber and they're running it on the poles. I've learned a few things since I retired to the area. One of them is the appreciation of reliability. So long as copper is an option, I'll probably keep it. Now, I may keep just one DSL hookup and switch to fiber but I think I'll keep my DSL for as long as I am able to.

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[harperska]

It doesn't matter if there is no practical barrier to fiber. Profiteering ISPs are just as much a barrier as physical distance, since at the end of the day, you still don't have fiber to your home. And without major changes to the regulatory landscape, there isn't a damn thing you can do about it.

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[JackSpratts]

Actually it will, and does. My very old rotary phone, pulse code and all, metal dial and all, works fine incoming and outgoing. So too the DSL, Netflix, Prime, torrents etc...even my Republic Moto X, with automatic wi-fi offloading of cell voice, text, SMS and data all via that ballsy little POTS line that's been supporting squirrels since my parents were kids.

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[Anonymous Coward]

The phrase is sort of used in two ways.

HUH? In context, here, in this thread, on this discussion, it's OBVIOUSLY being used in the "from the provider's building to my house" way! Why are you trying to muddle the conversation? And, I haven't even HEARD of your other "way" of use.

There isn't even a beginning to a valid excuse for a Telco not having fiber on "the last mile" in every residence in a densely populated area.

Do you have any fucking idea how expensive it is to start putting infrastructure into the ground? Any idea AT ALL?

Here's a valid excuse: the copper in these areas is still in good shape and is providing a service that is obviously popular enough to continue as is. There isn't a mass exodus and loss of customers forcing the company in question to replace what is working with something better.

I live in an extremely rural area (our town is ~7500 people, and is the largest town served by the ISP that I work for. Our population density outside of the towns is less than one per mile). We are putting in fiber to EVERYONE'S home (in town and rural) because the copper plant is old, and causing a lot of trouble for the customers, and therefore a lot of trouble tickets that we have to respond to, which costs money. Since we have to put a plow in the ground anyway, it makes more sense to put in fiber rather than new copper. It is much more cost prohibitive to do the rural areas, and much more fiscally responsible to do the cities rather than the rural, but we are doing it all because of one reason: the amount of trouble the old copper is causing is showing that it needs to be replaced in order to continue providing a working, acceptable service that is acceptable to the FCC and PUC.

If the provider in the cities that you are speaking of is NOT replacing their copper, it's because their plant is still in a good working state, and their customers are happy with the service that they are providing. The only thing that will trigger the change is if they start having issues, and start losing customers to competitors. Business is business: profits need to be made, and prices cannot be touched to cover new costs (as per the PUCs).

As far as the number of providers in a given area: this is economical and business driven. If there are already two (or more, in some cases) providers in an area, another competitor must determine whether or not it's financially viable to attempt to water down the customer base, and whether it can get enough customers from the existing providers to make enough to cover it's costs (at minimum) and make a profit (which is the point, right???) Also, they must prove to the local or state PUC that they will be able to carry on providing services for an extended period of time into the future, and not just bail out and leave their customers without service. The PUC requires that they run at a certain percentage of profit to ensure that the service is legitimate and able to stand the tests of time and competition (which can also lead to the inability to replace existing, working copper with new fiber). Usually, that is not feasible, which is why you see this purported "splitting" of the map which, by the way, does not exist. It's not like AT&T and Verizon execs have lunch and divide up the suburbs of Atlanta. That's quite the conspiracy theory you're living under.

Until you have actually worked in this industry, you should probably keep your opinions to yourself, as they are showing your ignorance. Also, you should probably get someone to review what you write before you submit: a lot of your post is next to incoherent and needs interpreting before comprehension.

Posting A/C because of my job.

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[WoTG]

LOL. Is there an app for that? I was always amazed by those modems that you put the handset onto some microphone thing? (Slightly before my time, so I only saw them in the movies, I started with a 2400 baud ISA modem...)

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[omnichad]

Audacity (the audio editor) even has a built in tone generator that will do DTMF.

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[Anonymous Coward]

omnichad cease your continual flow of unoriginal pap flowing forth from your simian thought patterns scribblings originating in your mongoloid cretin's doltish brain.

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[Anonymous Coward]

omnichad how did eating your words taste after apk made you eat them here http://slashdot.org/comments.p... ?

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[shaitand]

"HUH? In context, here, in this thread, on this discussion, it's OBVIOUSLY being used in the "from the provider's building to my house" way! Why are you trying to muddle the conversation? And, I haven't even HEARD of your other "way" of use."

Ummm... the great grand father post this entire conversation thread is under...

"Not everyone lives in a city. Even places that have "broadband" have pockets where DSL is the only option.

Just because you live in Seattle and have gigabit fiber doesn't mean the rest of the world does."

I'm sorry, believe me I realize how easy it is in Slashdot land to lose track, but I do believe in this case you are the one who has lost track.

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[shaitand]

Replying to your other points as a separate post here because while disputing the overall theme of the thread and the meaning of "the last mile" your comments are targeted at what I'm referring to, specifically the termination to premise (with the implication of the infrastructure to back it) in less densely populated areas.

"Until you have actually worked in this industry, you should probably keep your opinions to yourself, as they are showing your ignorance."

Currently, I work at the major enterprise level in datacenters. I don't actually run cable anymore although I do oversee such projects. Earlier in my career I worked in the trenches trucking around a tiny town of 12,000 pop in rural Illinois and the 150 mile radius around it of towns and "cities" with populations of 50 and up.

"Do you have any fucking idea how expensive it is to start putting infrastructure into the ground? Any idea AT ALL?"

Really expensive. Which is why telcos have been given tens of billions of dollars in tax funds to enable them to do it for free. Money they pocketed rather than invested in infrastructure.

"Here's a valid excuse: the copper in these areas is still in good shape and is providing a service that is obviously popular enough to continue as is. There isn't a mass exodus and loss of customers forcing the company in question to replace what is working with something better."

Exactly, just as I said, they are milking everything they can out of existing infrastructure. The service is popular because they are the only game in town. Either they claim to be an internet provider (cable company) and aren't required to allow competitors to provide service on their infrastructure or they are a telco and are required to do exactly that. Some companies like Verizon switch hats at will, using the advantages of being a telco to run lines without having to negotiate with property owners and/or cut the red tape in cities while putting on the ISP hat to prevent others from using the infrastructure they installed while wearing the telco hat.

Even for a company that is not doing what Verizon is, there is active collusion among the major telcos and providers to divide up the map to minimize actual competition. Basically the target is to have most of the map covered by two providers so they can't be called a monopoly, although especially in rural areas you can in many cases get away with only one offering service or the other to a specific address/zipcode/etc while claiming there are two providers in the larger general area and therefore competition. Other than this, no active collusion is needed, it is not in the interest of any of the major providers to actively race to the bottom providing minimum oversubscription, net neutrality, and the maximum possible bandwidth at the lowest profitable price point. It is in their interest to adopt an "if it aint broke don't fix it" model and discounts on modem rentals, contract discounts, etc.

Of course the service is popular, internet is an essential commodity to be competitive in the modern world and when your choice is between nothing and inferior out of date model, people choose the inferior out of date model. Hell, in a very rural area where you don't know that money to update everything has been provided time and time again to these services and enjoyed a service which is dramatically better many people might even believe what they have is good.

"It's not like AT&T and Verizon execs have lunch and divide up the suburbs of Atlanta. That's quite the conspiracy theory you're living under."

Actually that is exactly what happens. They divide up and trade around territory with the deliberate end of "avoiding anti-competition" laws and the FCC helps them do so. They are given tax money to build and maintain the most modern delivery infrastructure possible and competitors are supposed to be able to purchase transport at the telcos own wholesale cost to provide competing service over that same tax payer purchased infrastructure.

I really

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[shaitand]

That isn't really a common thing. It's as likely to happen out as at home and since everyone else also has a phone I can just use one of theirs during the 15min it takes to get mine back to operational.

But for the sake of argument lets say I live alone, there are no backup phones or batteries. I still don't see why I'd rely on an old school POTS line to my home rather than VOIP. Even if I want to use an old phone I can toss up a free PBX like Asterix which will create the illusion of using POTS but will just turn around and run my call out through a VOIP system. It's a fuzzy grey layer where POTS ends but I think it is fair to say you don't have POTs anymore when the POTS device converts to digital before leaving the premise.

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[shaitand]

Exactly, here we are, on this USian website, developed by USians, primarily populated by USians, run by a US company, paid for with US targeted advertising.

I for one am extremely glad this site has attracted attention and has regular followers and users from international communities and wouldn't have it any other way. But the fact remains this is a US site and therefore it is perfectly valid and correct to an unqualified generalization can and should be assumed to refer to the US.

Such as, "We have the right to free speech and bear arms, the Constitution protects it!" Because of the context, the comment being made on a US site, a poster making such a comment is perfectly correct in omitting that he is referring to the US and a reader would be incorrect in suggesting otherwise.

All stories, commentary, discussion of policy, legal matters, etc are by default referring to the same in the US unless someone indicates otherwise. It's really no different than reading an article in the Guardian. Unless they've specified otherwise, when they say something like "Obviously you aren't allowed to go walking about he streets with a firearm" we can safely assume they are referring to in the UK and have no need to clarify this sweeping statement does not necessarily apply elsewhere..

So in short, while it is interesting to know the state of things in France and the UK and an informative contract to point out, when someone says "pulse dialing is no longer supported" They are correctly referring to support in the US not making a generalization about the support elsewhere in the world.

  My point is The Guardian is a UK site, Al Jazherra is an arab site, and Slashdot is a US site. All enjoy and benefit from an international audience and their viewpoints. But by default, unless otherwise qualified, all gerneral and unqualified states should be assumed to refer to the place where the site is hosted and the primary target audience. When not intended in this way the poster should actually then qualify Correcting the speaker puts you in the wrong, not them.

Sorry if any of that is incoherent babbling, I'm dozing at the keys.

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[shaitand]

Cool. Most phone networks in the US have dropped support for pulse dialing so you are the exception.

That's cool though. I miss impressing girls by dialing to order a pizza using the hang-up button on the phone.

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[shaitand]

Nice, you have your own personal trolls.

Anyway, confirmed this feature in Audacity, good to know. Of course, it's been awhile since I've seen a landline to dial through but I suppose it likely works to dial #'s and join a meeting using a smartphone's speaker system.

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[shaitand]

That is how it should be with all internet service. The issue is that the lines run out to your house should be fiber because tax dollars have already paid the telcos to run those lines, you shouldn't have had to pay a cent individually. The telcos just take the money and keep it rather than upgrading infrastructure.

What has begun to happen is that they use their monopoly/duopoloy granted status to enjoy immunity on state and local levels, letting them run their cables over/under private property whether the owner likes it or not. And of course to get all those tax dollars for upgrading infrastructure (which don't come with strings requiring them to actually use said dollars to perform those upgrades or time table requirements). Once the infrastructure is in place, as a telco they'd be required to let other companies use that infrastructure and offer service at the same wholesale price they charge to their own provider arm. So they take off their telco hats, put on their ISP hats and ISPs are NOT required to let other companies utilize the infrastructure. A lot of the old DSL like yours comes from before they learned this trick so there are competing providers although the telcos come up with schemes providing volume discounts and the like to do their best to avoid those providers actually getting the service at the same cost their provider arm does.

It seems simple to me. Tax payers pay for the FIBER lines to the premise, the telcos are basically contractors hired to implement and maintain said lines. They should be selling that capacity at the same rate to their provider arm, me, you, or any other business who wants to compete in the ISP game. The performance should be a race to the top with the price being a race to the bottom. I somehow think you'd quickly find a reliable net neutral 1g up/down service for $20-50/mo fairly quickly in that world of how it is supposed to work.

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[shaitand]

Did this all the time. In truth I remember the announcement that carriers were going to remove pulse dialing but maybe there was public backlash against it. I'm not sure when the last time I saw an regular telephone was so I can't say I've tried it.

Hell, there used to be some payphones that combinations of tricks with the operator and the ability to pulse dial allow you to get free calls. It was also a handy trick in situations were you were only allowed one phone call for awhile.

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[KGIII]

I understand that taxes went to pay for them to upgrade. However, I'm not sure that it'd be reasonable for me to expect that to include my location. Asking it to include every American citizen would be a bit crazy, don't you think? I'm sure I'm close to the edge of what is reasonable and what is not reasonable.

I am not as remote as a loner in Alaska that flew in to his camp/house six years ago and has only been able to get back to civilization twice since then (though that does have a certain level of appeal for me). I am, on the other hand, on the side of a mountain in Maine. I am about 24 miles from the village and it's gotta be something like another 45 miles to a real town. It's a lot further to a city.

If I weren't likely to be getting fiber, I'd probably just shrug. I'm not really sure where I am on the "reasonable scale."

Oh, ha! I just double checked. I didn't add that in my earlier post. I'm actually probably going to get fiber at my house before this next winter. No, I can't tell you who told me that. ;-) However, it's a 'high probability.'

At any rate, I probably am getting access to fiber. It's going to be strung along the telephone poles so it's going to go down. Oh, that's not a question. It's going to go down - and probably frequently. I've had fiber access before - just not at my home in Maine. Fiber doesn't like being bent like it's going to be bent when the trees fall on it - and it's a certainty that trees are going to fall on it. They'll trim them as much as they reasonably can.

Err... I'll not give you exact directions but use Google maps to look around 24 miles from Rangeley, Maine. In some areas, we do have a wide berth for our utility lines. It's not quite enough, a tree hits it every year. That doesn't happen so much up near my way - it happens closer to town where they're less able to cut a giant swath of trees out without people frowning on it.

So, I'll be keeping DSL. I already have three disparate DSL connections. I'll probably run some of my own fiber, set up a trunk, and connect to that with a DSL failover automated in hardware. I'll probably drop one of the lines, maybe two.

But, what's reasonable? I mean, should I expect them to bring fiber to my particular house because they got some money (I think they got to keep a tax that was paid on phone/internet service?) at no additional cost to me? How about if I'm that guy out in Alaska with zero infrastructure at all? I'm not sure where I fit - it's already pretty much established that I'll have access to fiber soon but, if I didn't, should I be obligated to it? I'm kinda far out in the middle of nowhere. There are six residencies in my "neighborhood" (spanning many miles) and only four of them want 'net access. They've got DSL and I'm pretty sure zero of them will upgrade to fiber when it is an option. There are two who want nothing at all - one doesn't have a phone and isn't interested in the 'net and the other one doesn't have power or even running water and they're both by choice.

There's about three miles out of the village that might get some users and then there's pretty much nothing until until you get to my "neighborhood." Oh, I've paid some serious taxes. I've paid more in taxes than many people will earn in their lifetime. But, what's reasonable? Where is that line drawn?

I ask because I don't really know. Buggered if I know. I'm sure there's a reasonable and unreasonable point (fiber is expensive and it's really expensive to maintain it up here) and I'm not quite sure if I'm past the unreasonable point or not. I am not even the most remote. There are people, in my State, who are more remote than I am with *miles* of phone line that may have not been really touched in 50 years except to do repairs. What does unreasonable look like?

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[shaitand]

"Oh, I've paid some serious taxes. I've paid more in taxes than many people will earn in their lifetime. But, what's reasonable? Where is that line drawn?

I ask because I don't really know. Buggered if I know. I'm sure there's a reasonable and unreasonable point (fiber is expensive and it's really expensive to maintain it up here) and I'm not quite sure if I'm past the unreasonable point or not. I am not even the most remote. There are people, in my State, who are more remote than I am with *miles* of phone line that may have not been really touched in 50 years except to do repairs. What does unreasonable look like?"

There IS a point where unreasonable does become a thing and it sounds like you are taking about a location where people have moved because they don't want to be connected to the world. Internet has reached the point where it is essentially a utility. If you don't have fast access you don't access to a full compliment of education resources for your children. When you ask questions about the world you just continue not knowing the answers. When politicians rile people up about issues only the uneducated and uninformed could possibly believe people don't have access to information and remain uninformed when they vote for those people. In the modern age there is no excuse for people who might well vote getting their information from blatantly misleading and bias sources like CNN and Fox News.

Like it or not internet is a utility. I agree there is a reasonable line, some parts of Maine and most certain other remote mountain areas are likely unreasonable for any sort of "wired" connection. But fiber isn't more expensive than copper, it's actually less expensive. Copper is a semi-precious metal worth too much to make pennies from and all the copper pulled down can be recycled. Fiber is made from the second most common element in the earths crust. Fiber doesn't suffer from electromagnetic interference so no "noisy" lines and it be put in runs up to 1500 miles whereas copper requests powered junctions on the order of yards. Fiber is much cheaper than copper and much cheaper to maintain. The cost is just putting it in to begin with. And will be the medium for future technologies for the foreseeable future, trying to squeeze something more out of copper a magical dance that has been impressive but is definitely at it's end. So, if it is reasonable to run any sort of utility line out to you, I see no reason it isn't reasonable to run fiber lines. Especially when you and other americans have already paid for it. I'd say so long as there is a place we've already paid them to run fiber to that they haven't run it, then it's more reasonable to run that fiber than for them to pocket the money. And no, it's not just tax cuts on profits from phone bills, the telcos were given over twenty billion dollars in tax credits not just deductions.

There are places where even that isn't reasonable. At that point yes there are sat links, they suck but they work. But there are also designs for tough blimps that are a little closer to earth and efficient enough to float for 6 months at a time. A good sized network of those flying all over the place and they get crazy line of sight.

What year is this?

[pak9rabid]

Did I accidentally wake up in 1999?

Re:What year is this?

[JoeMerchant]

According to my prof in 1987, doing a paper on Shannon's work puts you back in 1959. (Fuzzy logic was his thing, in 1987.)

Re:What year is this?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what I thought... This is all very old news and not even newsworthy.. Must be a slow day.

Re:What year is this?

[Anonymous Coward]

What the hackaday people need is an ISDN line.

Re:What year is this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or 1959?

Re:What year is this?

[msauve]

"DSL is high-speed Internet"

No, it isn't.

Re:What year is this?

[shaitand]

I think the 1999 thing was more to having a discussion about DSL as if that is still a viable thing.

Re:What year is this?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what I thought... This is all very old news and not even newsworthy.. Must be a slow day.

/. is consistently behind with news. Apparently nerds are the last to know what's going on.

Re:What year is this?

[gstoddart]

The scary thing is I believe a lot of people likely still use it because that's all they can get.

Viable still applies if it's being sold, and lot of people are on it.

According to this (which is from 2013), 18% of American internet usage was on DSL.

I don't think "viable" means what you think it means. Used by tons of people and still actively sold ... well, it's outdated, but it's still viable.

Re:What year is this?

[dfm3]

Maybe old news, but seeing that DSL is still one of the only viable options for decent internet access in many parts of the US (excluding satellite), not completely irrelevant. Plus it's an interesting read from a historical and technical standpoint.

If this is the direction that Slashdot's new ownership is taking the site, it's still better than the barrage of constant articles meant to bring out the sjw/anti-sjw trolls, or articles about Trump's verbal flatulence, or *shudders* anything by Bennett.

Re:What year is this?

[c]

The scary thing is I believe a lot of people likely still use it because that's all they can get.

I'd be thrilled if I could get DSL.

Re:What year is this?

[Anonymous Coward]

The best part is, I don't have to pay a dime to the eeevil cable company.

My only eeevil cable company option is my only eeevil telephone option you insensitive clod!

Re:What year is this?

[i work on computers]

I think the 1999 thing was more to having a discussion about DSL as if that is still a viable thing.

I have 20Mbps DSL at home for about $30/month. How is that not viable?

Re:What year is this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly, it's not even available everywhere. My parents are a few miles outside a large city (500,000 + pop), but they fall outside the DSL coverage are (old lines out to them). It's pathetic 3G or 4G for them unless they want to pony up a larger chunk every month for satellite.

Re:What year is this?

[Anonymous Coward]

"DSL is high-speed Internet" No, it isn't.

You're an idiot.

Re:What year is this?

[gstoddart]

First ... you poor bastard.

Second ... exactly my point.

Re:What year is this?

[I4ko]

This is a lie. How do I know that? The HD Netflix streams require 8Mbps each (5.8Mbps data rate + packet and transport overhead). And SD is not worth watching.

Re:What year is this?

[omnichad]

If you have 20Mbps DSL, you probably have VDSL and some of your last mile has been upgraded to fiber - with fiber to a remote DSLAM. So it's not quite 100% Grandma's copper anymore.

Re:What year is this?

[Anonymous Coward]

He never said HD netflix streams.

Re:What year is this?

[shaitand]

"Viable still applies if it's being sold, and lot of people are on it.

According to this [digitaltrends.com] (which is from 2013), 18% of American internet usage was on DSL."

That's only true if those people have a legitimate choice and weren't duped into picking an obsolete slow connection by a monopoly refusing to modernize.

The article mentions 6mbps, that isn't fast enough to support many modern and common household internet usages which means customers are being sold a system which is not viable. You might be able to sell wooden slugs to people from the country as subway tokens, that doesn't make them viable.

Re:What year is this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Everything I said is true. If your numbers are right, my streams must be "SD" (although they're certainly the full width of the screen). I have no idea what HD vs. SD streaming looks like. I have no complaints about the picture quality. I've been streaming Netflix through my Wii since 2009 or so, and my kids do it on a tablet too.

Re:What year is this?

[jon3k]

I just finished Idea Factory which spends quite a bit of time on Claude Shannon, a really remarkable guy. Great book, lots of interesting Bell history. My only complaint is that Unix is only mentioned twice in the entire book and the second time it's referred to as a programming language. I was really hoping for more Unix history, but it tends to focus on earlier Bell and the transistor, satellite, the anti-trust suit, etc.

Re:What year is this?

[shaitand]

You certainly could get something much better than DSL if your carrier could be bothered. That is your only choice because they have a monopoly or duopoly (which isn't really any better than a monopoly).

I say this assuming you are in what is typically called the last mile rather than the actual last mile so far from civilization where there are no phone lines and sat communications are your only option. If you are in the arctic or at sea DSL capabilities may indeed be reasonable. To a point anyway, there is no particular reason high flying blimps couldn't be providing reasonable wireless by now.

Re:What year is this?

[Kjella]

It all depends on how far you are from the nearest central, 3-5 km out on basic ADSL is pretty crap. If you live close to the exchange or they've pulled fiber "close" and you get ADSL2 or VDSL you can get decent 10-50 Mbit. No doubt the growth is fiber though, here in Norway it's now 28% (+6%) fiber, 22% (-5%) DSL since last year.

Re:What year is this?

[shaitand]

And there is also still no excuse for the infrastructure not to have been upgraded to fiber by now. The telcos are just doing the absolute minimum they can, squeezing every obsolete drop of connectivity out of outdated infrastructure possible. For reference, in a real city you can have ridiculously overpriced 500mbps now in most places in the US and that really should be 1gbps minimum but even in large cities if you are serviced by only one major telco you are likely still limited to only one double digit speed option.

If it's 20mbps and you actually get that speed all the time then that at least is viable even if it's artificially slow.

Re:What year is this?

[Jeremi]

And SD is not worth watching.

I don't get that logic -- if it's a good movie, it will still be a good movie in SD. If it's a bad movie, it will suck even more in HD.

The subset of movies that are worth watching in HD but not worth watching in SD must be very small -- Avatar, maybe?

Re:What year is this?

[c]

You certainly could get something much better than DSL if your carrier could be bothered. That is your only choice because they have a monopoly or duopoly (which isn't really any better than a monopoly).

I have a choice of broadband wireless providers (two that I know of), or satellite broadband. Or I could use cellular service for the week or so before I maxed it out.

I suspect in a few years I might be able to get fiber, depending on what they're doing with those lines they ran down the highway at the edge of my yard. Unless they did that just to taunt me.

Re:What year is this?

[NJRoadfan]

Verizon can't even be bothered to maintain their copper lines for POTS, let alone offer DSL.

Re:What year is this?

[c]

Well, fixed wireless broadband isn't *horrible* compared to some alternatives. I went from DSL to 28.8k dial-up for a few years and that was... well, I didn't worry about congestion from neighbours, that's for sure.

The only advantage of fixed wireless over DSL or cable is that I don't have to worry much about where I put holes in the ground; the only line coming onto my property that I care about is overhead.

Re:What year is this?

[Blaskowicz]

Can't speak for netflix but SD video is definitely worth watching. Who cares? A computer monitor isn't a giant TV.

Re:What year is this?

[pak9rabid]

It just reminds me of something that would have been in Wired, cira 1998-99.

Re:What year is this?

[Dragonslicer]

I'd be thrilled if I could get DSL.

Your Internet connection is so bad, you only have enough bandwidth for one letter in your username.

Re:What year is this?

[shaitand]

One HD netflix stream would use most of that pipe and the telcos artificially throttle it causing all your "this can't be played at this time" and stuttering. Sounds like you are watching low quality streams.

How is paying to the evil telco better than paying to the evil cable company?

The issue is not so much what you need as being entitled to the best access that can reasonably be provided. If you currently have 12mbps dsl (which should be delivering 12mbps) then there is absolutely no reason you shouldn't have a 1gbps link available other than telcos refusing to upgrade infrastructure. Fiber runs can go for thousands of miles, I'm pretty sure they can reach you.

Now, if you simply choose a slower speed on purpose, paying that $6/mo that link should reasonably cost for dedicated bandwidth that is another story. 640gps chips run about $600/ea last time I looked and provide that bandwidth bi-directionally two ways.. They'll last about 10-15 years on average. So lets call it 10. It takes maybe $5k to build a box around those chips around it but then the box will cost maybe $800 if deployed everywhere on scale (this is what any telco can and should do not off the shelf from cisco and the like). So that is $12.5 cents per full duplex gbps so 1gbps AND 1gbps down maxed at the same time... once every ten years and that is only going down over time. Of course that is at the DC not to the premise. Just one of those chips will provide 10 64gbps links or 64 10gbps links over fiber or copper. With those distribution links there is absolutely no reason that nearly everywhere in the lower 48 that is called the last mile (think rural density, rough terrain can still be an issue) could have 1gbps service. Allowing for normal service tiers 100mb up/down connections for $12.50/mo are very reasonable. Maybe double that for the most rural areas. In the cities it should be more like 1gbps for $50/mo.

Re:What year is this?

[shaitand]

Going sat wouldn't really be a good thing. Yeah it's high bandwidth but the latency is ridiculous.

Re:What year is this?

[I4ko]

Yep, Wii is SD (480 vertical pixels) and the stream for that is 2.1Mbps. (1.75Mbps of data + the overhead). As to the arguments about things worth watching in SD, you are all right, good stories can be watched in SD, but NTSC resolution to me is just too little vertical resolution for letterbox (from 480 original vertical pixels only 308 go to the movie). I would prefer PAL (576 vertical points original, so 370 go to the movie), not to mention all the non-square pixel issues that anamorphic formats create.

Re:What year is this?

[c]

Your Internet connection is so bad, you only have enough bandwidth for one letter in your username.

I s

-*- click -*-

Re:What year is this?

[Rising Ape]

It is. Plenty of things don't need more than the 5-10 Mbps you can typically get with ADSL, and if that's not enough there's VDSL2 which gets you tens of MBps.

Besides, cable and especially FTTH are much less widely available.

Re:What year is this?

[Rising Ape]

The article mentions 6mbps, that isn't fast enough to support many modern and common household internet usages

Like what? It's enough for TV-quality streaming video, web browsing, VoIP, email and all the usual stuff I can think of.

Re:What year is this?

[The-Ixian]

Yep, and in my apt building we have fiber to the basement and G.fast DSL (1Gbps) up to the unit.

Even if we opt out of that full 1Gbps, we have the option for 100, 60, 40 and 20Mbps DSL.

To contrast, the cable company can only deliver 10Mbps into our unit. I tried it for about a day before I canceled that service... I was effectively getting only 2Mpbs.

Re:What year is this?

[Obfuscant]

The article mentions 6mbps, that isn't fast enough to support many modern and common household internet usages

Like what? It's enough for TV-quality streaming video,

No, this must be one of the few times where they actually mean 6 MILLI-bits per second (mbps) and not 6 MEGA-bits per second (Mbps). Six mbps means you get one character every, umm, 27 minutes. Six Mbps would be fast enough for streaming all kinds of things.

Re:What year is this?

[bdhall1313]

I live in a small town. Population around 2,800. We have 25mb DSL here that works very well.

Re: What year is this?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you meant MBps and not Mbps.

Re: What year is this?

[Anonymous Coward]

The cost of doing fiber builds is huge. But it's not the fiber it electronics that power it that makes it so expensive. It's the construction crews digging and laying conduit or stringing the fiber on the poles that cost a fortune. Most times this is subcontracted out. I'm sure it would still be expensive for consumers. Myself i can't get dsl or cable. I used to have dsl until the cable outside got damaged and frontier refused to fix it. You want to talk about miserable service providers... In the suck category it's tough to top frontier

Re:What year is this?

[Darinbob]

And even if you get DSL you may not get the best DSL either. Older neighborhoods may be really bad in this regard.

Re:What year is this?

[Darinbob]

Though his child, c++, has better connectivity.

Re:What year is this?

[Anonymous Coward]

> That is your only choice because fiber to the middle of nowhere is expensive and tends to require work in longstanding stable utility tunnels, which puts them at risk and cannot be done on a whim.

Fixed That For You.

Re:What year is this?

[muridae]

I'd be thrilled if the DSL here was rated above 1 Mbps.

Instead I get 10 Mbps cable with a low GB-per-month cap, that have actively hijacked google's DNS record to point to their own . . . I dunno, local cache or something. HTTPS Everywhere kept me from noticing for the last month.

Re:What year is this?

[Anonymous Coward]

You call them a liar, they show you that they're not lying, and you don't even have the capacity to be man enough to apologize. Pathetic.

Re:What year is this?

[Anonymous Coward]

gstoddart please don't delude yourself into thinking you actually can impart any useful or original information we don't already know upon us in your scribblings, ok? Please stfu. Nobody here likes your babboon from the zoo illogic logic reasoning from a mongoloid dolt such as yourself with a 10 below plantlife IQ.

Re:What year is this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Spare us mongoloid. gstoddart everytime I see you attempt to write something I see a babboon in place of yourself doing it hahahahaha.

Re:What year is this?

[Anonymous Coward]

When I moved from Sunnyvale to Mountain View (California), I was not able to continue to have Uverse (from ATT) but had to fall back to DSL. Lately, my DSL failed and I upgraded to Uverse (now available where I moved). My area is mostly "owned" by Comcast (Xfinity) so ATT was slow in bringing Uverse here. Currently, DSL is deprecated and only provided in areas where Uverse is not available. When they were unsuccessful in "fixing" my DSL connection, I was told that they weren't going to invest any more money in that infrastructure. As I didn't wish to switch to Comcast, I went with Uverse.

It's my understanding that DSL uses copper all the way back to the Central Office, whereas Uverse uses fiber from the CO to the B-Box and (that same) copper into the residence. The other (significant) change is that DSL uses a (passive) filter to remove the data and provide a "clean" dial tone for a phone or phones anywhere in the residence, whereas Uverse goes into the Uverse "modem" (box) and both dial tone and ethernet come out of that only; no filter needed (or allowed). This meant that I had to put the base station (transmitter) for my portable phones next to the Uverse box. (sigh)

Re:What year is this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now go away or I shall taunt you a second time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSGkBWYDmrM

Re: What year is this?

[shaitand]

"The cost of doing fiber builds is huge."

True, which is why billions of tax dollars have been given to the major telcos to effectively make digging all those holes and running those lines free. Additionally, they are granted special exemptions from local government, allowing them to tear up property or run along poles over property without paying the individual owners of the property. When taking this money and special exemptions they function as telecommunication providers, the justification for the benefits being that once the lines and infrastructure are in place anyone is allowed to start a competiting service and utilize that common infrastructure, paying only the wholesale cost of the telco itself to provide service on it. Once infrastructure is built, the telcos switch hats and now say that are not acting as telecommunications companies but internet providers and internet providers do not have to allow competitors to use their infrastructure.

But what happens in most cases is that because they are given the money without strings being attached, requiring them to use it for it's intended purpose, telcos instead continue using existing lines and pocketing those tax dollars. The result is of course inferior service like you describe instead of a fast, cheap, and reliable service with 5 or 6 competitors bidding against each other and you picking the one with terms that best suit you. All of which would be providing service over that fast and reliable fiber run directly to your premise on the taxpayer dime.

"I used to have dsl until the cable outside got damaged and frontier refused to fix it."

But I'm sure frontier lists you on a coverage map when they talk to the FCC. The whole thing is really supposed to work more like electricity does here in Texas. In my area there is a company call encore to that provides and maintains the actual physical power lines. They are granted a monopoly and given tax dollars to pay all the expenses of doing so, in exchange for that they get to bypass private property rights to run those lines and are allowed to charge a mark up on the usage that goes through the lines although how much of a markup is regulated (which seems fair enough since taxes pay all the expenses, it's all guaranteed free gravy).

Power producers are then located all over the place wherever it makes sense and sell wholesale energy onto the grid, again in many cases tax dollars are paying to build these facilities and if they are green federal credits are provided on top of that. Finally, brokers who bill themselves as "electric providers" actually sell their service to end users such as me and everyone on the block. Encore, in addition to being the ones who happen to manage the lines on my block are one of these. Similarly, some of these providers do indeed run power plants feeding into the grid, although it might be nowhere near me. I then can shop among maybe 20 different "providers" choosing the ones with terms I approve of. The state requires them to list on a central site where you can compare terms (although you do have to be careful to read the fine print) and provide a disclosure similar to the one you get with CC offers as well as make a number of points about the service indexed and searchable.

This provides actual choice and competition. I can choose 100% or partially % green energy providers or plans from those providers if I want. The actual bit of juice that runs through my meter may have come from a coal plant, but that provider will purchase enough wholesale from wind and solar plants feeding into the grid to cover my usage which funds solar and wind energy or they may even run their own plant at some point feeding into the grid. Either way, I maybe pay a small premium but it helps fund building more solar and wind plants to support my usage. Or I can go for the lowest rate, some plans have a fixed charge and then low rates, which might be a very low price if you consistently have enough usage that you always work out at the low rate.

Most have anywher

Re:What year is this?

[shaitand]

"That is your only choice because fiber to the middle of nowhere is expensive and tends to require work in longstanding stable utility tunnels, which puts them at risk and cannot be done on a whim."

All true. Fortunately, billions of dollars have been provided to telcos making deploying that fiber free and local government grants them immunities and eminent domain protections allowing them to lay out those lines without property owners having a say in the matter. Telcos however are required to build that infrastructure and maintain it, and then have a separate provider arm that purchases capacity on those lines at a market wholesale rate from the infrastructure arm and allow third parties to purchase at those same rates and provide service as well.

Luckily, these telcos generally pocket these funds they are given to build the infrastructure since it usually doesn't carry strings actually forcing them to use it for it's purpose. And where they do build infrastructure, they leave the telco hat on long enough to get it built and enjoy all those monopoly protections and then switch to their broadband provider hat, broadband providers aren't required to let anyone purchase capacity and utilize their infrastructure to compete with them.

There actually are a small scattering of places where it has happened the way it is supposed to and the telco maintains lines and a number of providers actually offer service via those lines. But usually instead of a fixed and uniform equal price for all scheme the telco comes up with a number of criteria and pricing break conditions for things like volume, credit on account, and just barriers in the sign-up process to become a provider to make sure nobody can actually get the capacity at as low a rate as them or compete successfully.

Re:What year is this?

[shaitand]

Traditionally network bandwidth is always rated in bits per secnd.

It's an hack

[Anonymous Coward]

Would have been nice if DSL never existed, dial-up would be the norm and websites would not be bloated, no social media or other bullshit.
Instead companies keep profiting while not investing anything into upgrading the rotting copper.

Re:It's an hack

[sims 2]

Yeah! They should have never started selling 1TBps fiber connections. We wouldn't have all these holovideos, remote windows and HD video ads that can't be muted. Most people don't even have their own computers anymore they just buy these mini-terminals and pay $10/mo applecorp for time on the applecore mainframe system.

Yep If no one had ever bothered to build the infrastructure lots of things like youtube, netflix, remote surgeons, drones, video calling and working from home wouldn't be possible today.

But yeah we could have just stayed in the dark on dialup and still had facebook and everyone would just have ascii art for their profile pic..

Re:It's an hack

[shaitand]

The thought of a world of dial-up is terrifying but I share your pain regarding bloated sites.

Re:It's an hack

[antdude]

Nah, ANSI or RIP art. ;)

Re:It's an hack

[antdude]

You can still use dial-up these days if you still have copper lines. :P

Are we newbies?

[duke_cheetah2003]

I mean this history lesson is fascinating, but really, I think most of /. knows how DSL works alongside voice on POTS.

Re:Are we newbies?

[sims 2]

Yep we do.
My problem is At&t.
They want to run VoIP over my DSL line over my POTS line.
Sounds reliable don't it?

Re:Are we newbies?

[Blaskowicz]

You mean, they want to run VoIP over IP? How rude.
At&t should allow for a dedicated low bandwith link with end-to-end connection, so you can run your VoIP without bad quality, jitter and lost packets.

Re:Are we newbies?

[sims 2]

Yeah as of now I have POTS with phone > DSL modem > router.
They are trying to get me to switch to POTS no phone > DSL modem with voip bridged back to pots line > router

As of now I can lose phone without losing DSL and I can lose DSL without losing my phone.

So then If my dsl goes down I lose both internet and phone.

They've been advertising it as fiber optic phone service.

Sigh.

[ledow]

Looks like the new owners of Slashdot are also failing to combat the biggest problem faced by the site for the last few years.

Junk making the front page that talks to me like I don't already work in IT or understand how common household technologies work.

Re:Sigh.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nerds do not only work in IT you insensitive clod!

Re:Sigh.

[Anonymous Coward]

And up-and-coming IT nerds still need to get this information somewhere.

Re:Sigh.

[DerekLyons]

You do understand that Slashdot has users from a wide variety of backgrounds? If you don't like it, scroll on by.

Re:Sigh.

[Jeremi]

Junk making the front page that talks to me like I don't already work in IT or understand how common household technologies work.

Who are you? I didn't understand how DSL worked until I read the article, now I do. (Well, probably not, but now I know more than I did)

Re:Sigh.

[shaitand]

Why? It's obsolete tech.

Re:Sigh.

[amlu]

i disagree with you. for me its a technically minded article about technology that refuses to die and is still widely used. prefer reading that, much better than the recent stuff about another 3d printed gadget or some crazy gun related politics on another continent.

Re:Sigh.

[complete loony]

Sure it's not "news" to many of us, but might still be interesting to some.

Cable is still copper and some areas have old

[Joe_Dragon]

Cable is still copper and some areas have old plants that some of the big guys like Comcast are not really upgrading that much.

Re:Cable is still copper and some areas have old

[I4ko]

In most areas I know, phone cables are lead with oiled paper insulation...

Re:Cable is still copper and some areas have old

[ChrisMaple]

Not likely, lead has only 8% of the conductivity of copper. If you see a silvery-looking telephone wire, it's likely to be "tinned" copper, copper with a thin outer layer of tin or lead-tin solder. Lead is also very weak, only 5% of the ultimate tensile strength of copper.

Re:Cable is still copper and some areas have old

[I4ko]

Nope, I literally mean cables laid down back in late 1890s and early 1900s

Re:Cable is still copper and some areas have old

[shaitand]

I've yet to see lead phone cables but anything is possible I suppose.

Re:Cable is still copper and some areas have old

[MightyYar]

Are you sure it's not lead sheathing around copper conductors? This was common for noise insulation and waterproofing - but I'm surprised that they would use lead conductors.

Re:Cable is still copper and some areas have old

[I4ko]

According to this page http://www.copper.org/applicat... you are right. And the rime frame matches exactly. I should turn my geek card in. Last time I was out digging cables was back in 2004.

Claude Shannon

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Claude Shannon was truly one of the unrecognized geniuses of his time.

He was an amazingly brilliant man who got very little of the recognition he deserved. Virtually ALL modern-day communication depends directly on the algorithms and information theory practices he invented. He's quite rightly known as the "founding father of electronic communications age".

He was still alive when I was in tech school, quite literally a "living legend".

Re:Claude Shannon

[slew]

Claude Shannon was truly one of the unrecognized geniuses of his time.... He was still alive when I was in tech school, quite literally a "living legend".

Not sure how old you are, but he was apparently one of the *recognized* geniuses of his time. He has a long list of awards dating back to an AIAE 1940, a National Medal of Science in 1966, to the Kyoto prize in 1985 and quite a few lifetime achievement awards since that time...

You don't get that type of swag and get to claim to be unrecognized (not that Mr Shannon was the type to crave any recognition, by some accounts he didn't really care for the stuff)...

On the other hand, Rosalind Franklin, Emmy Noether, and Hedy Lamarr were maybe the most unrecognized geniuses of their time, but of course people didn't recognize certain contributions back in those days...

Re:Claude Shannon

[EdwinFreed]

Don't forget Katherine Blodgett. If you aren't aware of her contributions, by all means look her up.

Re:Claude Shannon

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget Katherine Blodgett. If you aren't aware of her contributions, by all means look her up.

My point was simply that there were several folks that were simply *unrecognized* for their accomplishments during their time.
By the same criteria, Ms Blodgett was one of those *recognized* during her time for her accomplishments (via various awards) just like Mr Shannon. I'm not forgetting, she was considered and rejected as fitting that label.

Re:Claude Shannon

[Anonymous Coward]

JustAnotherOldBlowhardBULLSHITTER why'd ya lie about working for Microsoft? Can ya prove that statement? No? Thought not. Must be an "NDA" that ya signed with yer fantasyland fake name here online, right? Hahahahaha (the bullshit and foam spewing from JustAnotherOldBLOWHWARD's piehole will ensue - stay tuned, keep yer seatbelts on everyone! Hilarity will ensue, guaranteed!) People this old fuck liar I just replied to is at best a cabin boy on some ship blowing the captain in those lonely hours on ship at sea hahahaha and he likes it. He likes his job. He's good at that job.

Re:Claude Shannon

[Anonymous Coward]

Rotflmao! Cabin boy in the lonely hours at sea sucking up the captain's gravy is JustAnotherOldGuy.

Let's not forget

[Dcnjoe60]

Let's not forget that there was also the option of running high speed internet over the power lines. It does mess with Ham operators signals, though, so is not widely adopted. But in areas where it is adopted, people seem pretty satisfied.

Re:Let's not forget

[gazingous]

The hams fought it fiercely but the interference wasn't just to hams. The problem is most radio users don't understand why they are suddenly seeing interference. They cannot pin it down to the power line internet. The real problem would have been the interference 100s of miles away since the signal was on HF.

Re:Let's not forget

[Anonymous Coward]

Do not get me *going* on the switching harmonics of long-running household and distribution network transformers, and the stunningly high noise floor on those power lines. You get vaguely clean power on your house because they keep filtering it as often as feasible: putting in filter gaps for data communications is... oh, dear lord, not cheap and not reliable.

you forgot the answer to the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

which is, for right now, cable

Look at what you can do with a single coaxial wire

[NotDrWho]

Forget twisted pair. I have hundreds of cable channels and a 25 Mbps internet all brought into my home with a single coaxial wire.

You can put DIGITAL SIGNALS on your phone line!!!

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

And your computer is LEAKING AN IP ADDRESS RIGHT NOW!!!

Who selects this kind of crap for SlashDot? If you don't know how DSL works 20 years after it became a popular option, turn in your geek card and GTFOML.

I worked on some of this.

[sbaker]

Many *MANY* years ago I was working as a software engineer at Philips Research in the early 1980's when they were looking into ISDN systems somewhat like DSL for the UK market - the business of sending anything over twisted pair copper is a nightmare. I wasn't directly working on the electronics (I was doing software) - but I shared an office with people who did...and they had a heck of a time characterizing the wires that their signals had to go down.

As I recall, the problems mostly come where one wire is spliced into another. Much of this infrastructure was put in the 1900's and it's horrible. Sometimes wires are just twisted together and capped, sometimes twisted and taped, sometimes twisted and just left open to the elements, sometimes they are soldered. Sometimes the places where the wires are joined gets wet when it rains. Sometimes the tightness of the twisted wire connection depends on the ambient temperature. The amount of cross-talk between wires is all over the map as different kinds of insulation was used (and much of it has degraded over the years). At the subscriber end, there were all kinds of phones being used - plus ugly stuff like "Party lines" (where two houses share a phone line!) that had been abandoned leaving extra wires in the ground that were still connected to the network.

All of those things affect the ability to get a decent amount of bandwidth down a wire that was never designed to do it. So the electronics has to be smart about the signal being reflected at each splice down the line and causing 'echoes', and designing affordable circuitry to detect and cancel those echoes was a nightmare. The amount of attenuation you'll get is all over the map - everything has to self- adjust and monitor to give it any chance of working.

So, as poor as DSL can be - it's a miracle it works at all over crappy old telephone wires.

    -- Steve

Phone portion goes unused

[Blaskowicz]

These days in my country at least the router/modem provided by the ISP has a connector to plug an old (or new) land phone in, but it goes over VoIP. You have an RJ11 to phone plug adapter if needed.
"Real" POTS is something you would have to look for, likely from the former monopoly ("historical") operator. Or maybe in a few areas left where things still have to go through the historical operator even when your ISP is something else.

BTW grandma has had a DECT cordless for a while. Also, a permanently seated laptop (where there used to be a videotex terminal) that still feels new even though it's perhaps eight/nine year old. Grandma seems to keep stuff in amazing working order and cleanliness (e.g. a vacuum from the 70s) not necessarily clinging to old stuff. Why throw away something that isn't even 20-year-old?, lol.

Re:Phone portion goes unused

[petermgreen]

Out of interest which country? Here in the UK phone service is still usually delievered over "real POTS". ADSL and VDSL (FTTC) users use filters/splitters to seperate voice and DSL. The cable company runs phone wiring alongside the cable TV wiring (and have done so since long before the days of cable modems).

FTTH services may be an exception but those are still pretty rare here.

Re:Phone portion goes unused

[Blaskowicz]

France. I should have been clearer maybe, it's POTS lines and the filters/splitters, but I believe the ISP may not bother providing the plain voice service.

F#$^#$^@

[barakn]

My grandmas are dead, you insensitive clod.

POTS is not twisted pair

[Anonymous Coward]

That is all.

Uhm. What?

[Chas]

DSL is high speed internet...

And I stopped reading bullshit article right there...

easy to use

[Anonymous Coward]

some vdsl modems can be used as ethernet bridges via dip switch.
so if you need to connect two ethernet networks, you can feed it into
the vdsl bridge, which will then send it over TWO wires to the other
vdsl bridge which converts it back to eight wire ethernet.
the two wire cable is also dirt cheap and can be longer then max 300 meters
for copper wire ethernet ...

have fun making your own phiber optic network though :P

Re:Uhm. What?

[gazingous]

That's a neat trick since those words weren't used in the article.

Re:Look at what you can do with a single coaxial w

[MightyYar]

Twisted? Luxury!

Re:Uhm. What?

[Chas]

No, but it was used in the original post reporting the article...

Disagree

[kbahey]

I disagree.

Not everyone here studied this stuff. Some of us are self taught, or are experienced in other fields (software, systems admin) ...etc.

So, having stuff like this is enriching to some here, and relevant to the site ...

Re:Disagree

[vandamme]

I'm a retired vacuum tube engineer, you insensitive clod!

(At least the first part of this statement is true.)

Someone explain this.

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember back in dialup times being told that 56k was the absolute maximum that copper could transmit. Then DSL comes along. Did the laws of physics change? No one ever explained how the old "rule" got thrown out.

Re:Someone explain this.

[xombo]

Read the article. It's explained, there.

sonic.net

[Anonymous Coward]

I use sonic.net as my ISP because they are good guys and my alternatives are spawn of the devil (e.g., Comcast), but sonic.net does DSL. I live very close to the switching station and surprisingly get 20mbps reliably. Not as fast as Comcast cable or AT&T U-Verse but fast enough for streaming video. I used sonic.net at my previous address as well, which was not so conveniently located, and drew only about 7mbs there, so location is significant. Also of note: in three years at this address, the number of minutes of service interruption I've suffered is zero. Yes, a splitter is involved for the telephone service.

It was 99 cents! (per gigabyte)

[purplepolecat]

I use your grandma's phone
The speed's incredible
I'm downloading Game Of Thrones
From that copper in the wall

is that actually high speed

[Archfeld]

Does 6mbps actually qualify as high-speed anymore ? I thought Congress/FCC decided it had to be like 50 mbps to be called high speed ?

Re:is that actually high speed

[EzInKy]

It's all in the phrasing. Broadband may be 50MBS, high speed is anything over 56k.

"*News* for Nerds"

[Anonymous Coward]

This is pure history.

Re:Uhm. What?

[Anonymous Coward]

DSL is high speed internet...

And I stopped reading bullshit article right there...

My 15 Mb/s DSL connection feels pretty snappy to me, for that matter so did my 7Mb/s connection before it. Speed is speed regardless of method used.

Re:Look at what you can do with a single coaxial w

[EzInKy]

If it weren't for the greediness of cable companies, I'd jump right onto that. I'll never forgive one for continuing to bill more 3 months after I canceled service, and dinged my credit for 7 years because I refused to pay for their billing error.