I know this is a off topic but when I come on to Trains.com or some other site my DSL helps me to get on web site alot faster than 56K dial up. I have my computer connected to the Ethernet port. When the High speed is in progress the Ethernet blinks very fast. Can someone please explain to me just how DSL realy works.
Thanks,Allan.
Alan -
Try http://www.dslreports.com/
Excellent site for any broadband questions including VOIP.
Dave
Take a copper wire.
Throw away about 80% of the diameter.
That is your dailup. Government laws prohibit transmission of data faster than 33kb/sec. (You can get close to 56k but that is actually splitting the signal)
Now broadband fills up that copper. You need filters so the very small and faint voice signal does not get lost in the Niagra Falls Thunder of the DSL Signal.
In less than one year we are throwing away copper ethernet and going FTTH (Fiber to the home) that has 2 Meg up and 5 meg down speeds. Fast enough to render DSL, Cable and satellite TV obselete. Not to mention shattering the 3 mile radius of DSL and extending that to 180 miles to one house.
Hard Disks are the bottle neck on computers hooked to fast connections. Thankfully SATA2 and similar drives promise to permit computers to keep up.
Stay tuned, there is a movement afoot to bring the United States into the age of the light and freed from the weighty and obselete copper infrastructure.
that’s all fine and dandy for those of you who live in town, but for me out here in the sticks we have few options. fortunately we’re close enough to a wireless tower to be able to recieve our internet through there. we bolted a briefcase sized antenna thingamajigger on the side of the house and away we went… works like a charm. now, all i need is a lap top and a wireless router so i can surf from the lazyboy [8D]
There are already T-3 lines that are that fast, we have them, along with T-1 lines for data transmission at work…
For those in remote areas, a strand of Fiber will reach 180 miles from the central office instead of three miles in a city or town.
Within a year or two many states should complete “Lighting” the lines up.
Here is a Federal Government Powerpoint on the situation with FTTH in the USA that was part of my schooling last year.
You may need to download a powerpoint reader for this document.
Just a thought, the T-=1 and T-3 lines we use for data transmission between sites are copper…fibers do increase distance, then again, so do repeaters…
Our DSL provider (SBC phone) has just offered me the faster DSL at only $29.95 per month ($3.00 per month more than I was paying) Yes it is faster. Now my computor is the slow part.
I can upload pics to Shutterfly at about 3.5 mgs per minute.[:D]
Highiron,
Having spent many a year working for Comcast(cable monster for many), I agree with you whole-heartedly that fiber-to-the-home is the future. The only thing keeping companies like Comcast from doing it is their joy in milking what they can from what they have. As soon as this attitude starts affecting their bottom line(hence when people start looking towards new competition, etc.), thats when they will start to react. I supervised many a mile of fiber construction for them and it only touched the fringe of what they would have to upgrade to bring this to reality. I watched as they cut corners to keep as much of the original coax cable they could. Big mistake in my book as this will be happening soon I think.
Shrek
shrek623,
Where at in northern Illinois do you work out of. I was just curious because I did a LOT of fiber splicing up there and set up several head ends.
I deal with fiber daily - our backbone is currently 155Mbs and will be Gig-E shortly. We have 10Mbs to most desktops, and 100Mbs to many. Our “pipe” going off the campus is 15Mbs, and we generally use about 60-80% of it.
When people ask us why things are so slow, we tell them it’s out on the 'Net…
A simple and (relatively) inexpensive single-mode media converter (changes the signal from/to light from ethernet), available to anyone with the cash, will push 20km +. For a little more, you can easily double that. If you can get the fiber to your house (I don’t see that at my place for a while), you can get some pretty good speeds (the media converters we use will run at 100Mbs).
A 9600 baud modem used to seem so fast…
BellSouth down here in the Southeast is starting to offer DSL up to 6Mbs. By the 1st quarter of 2006 they will offer 12Mbs dsl. This is still on copper pairs. They are also planning to offer a plan where they bond two copper pairs together and get speeds of up to 24 to 36 Mbs. Copper is not dead yet but fiber is the future. However, it will be a while before FTTH becomes a reality for most people.
If you want really fast speeds you should see some of the equipment the phone companies use to transport data between offices. 17Gigabits per second is normal. They have a few systems they are trying out now that are moving at 1 to 2 TERRAbytes per second.
DWDM
Hot diggity!
Just last week I caugt a Verizon guy climbing the pole in my back yard, and he said he was doing a “pre-install” survey for the FiOS network they will be bringing in this summer…
15Mb/s speed for $49.95/mo.
We just got Verizon DSL last week. Like famer3, we live in a small town, and couldn’t get anyone’s DSL. It’s sooooooo much better than the dialup we had and only costs us ten bucks more a month.
mike