[plug] adsl opinions & clarification & DSL300

[Craig Ringer]

> At present, it all seems too complicated, and too expensive, for the 
> benefits(?) of ADSL.

I'd personally say that the main problems are byte-charging and 
reliability. Price is reasonable when you compare it to a _quality_ 56k 
plan IMHO.

> Especially when, given that we are using either a 
> 33600 or a 56k bits/s modem (I am not sure which it is), the best 
> sustained data download rate that we can obtain, is 3kb/s. We can 
> sometimes get bursts of 4-5kb/s, but that is never sustained.
> 
> As the phone line that we use for dialling up, is in an ADSL enabled 
> exchange, it is difficult to understand how upgrading to ADSL, would 
> give us any great advantage in download speeds.

I don't understand. Even 128kbps DSL (only available from Aarachnet 
AFAIK) would be approx 3 times the speed of your current connection, and 
the usual basic DSL plans are 256kbps (5 - 7 times the speed of yours). 
Thats a big difference.

> dropouts appear to be (reasonably)
> common, so that reconnecting (extra phone calls), appears to be 
> necessary each month.

Service outages are reasonably common, but there is no phone call 
involved in reconnecting. Zero cost, its ppp _over_ _ethernet_.

> the upfront cost would be several hundred dollars, 
> for home use
 > [snip]
> From memory, at that time, it was about 
> $800 to get a satellite dish, and about $80 per month.

My costs were/are < $500 set-up + $80/month for 512/128kbps DSL with 
WestNet. When its working, we get 45 - 55 kilobytes per second incoming, 
which is ten to fifteen times normal modem data rates, and at least 10 
kilobytes per second outgoing.

-- 
Craig Ringer
GPG Key Fingerprint: AF1C ABFE 7E64 E9C8 FC27  C16E D3CE CDC0 0E93 380D
	-- if it ain't broke, add features 'till it is. (or:)
	while (! broken) { features ++ ; broken = isBroken(features) }