I feel the need…. fer speed!
ADSL is coming to town. The Asymmetric Digital Subcriber Line is the latest high- speed data offering from BellSouth and other RBOCs and CLECs. At up to 1.5Mbps (Megabits per sec.), it’s almost like getting web pages right off your own hard drive.
ADSL rivals cable-modem service for the next-wave cool Internet hook-up. Unlike cable-modem, though, you don’t share the bandwidth with the rest of your neighborhood. Your high-speed connection travels right to the phone company CO, where it is run through the DSLAM and ramped right onto the GWAN.
In the [hopefully] never-ending quest to bring higher and higher speed Internet access [for a price] to mortals like you and me, somebody figured out that– if your house is 18,000 feet or less from the CO and there are no load coils, amplifiers, or other phone company gizmos in the path (like fiber-optics, oddly enough)– data can be carried on your telephone line at what are basically AM radio band frequencies, at up to 8Mbps (downstream, under ideal conditions). So, 1.5Mbps should be a piece of cake. And the best part is that it’s super-imposed right onto your regular line, so you can talk on the phone while you surf! And it’s always on– no dialing or waiting to connect!
BTW, ADSL was initially conceived for VoD, which only requires 4Mbps. This could be so cool…
I submitted the online qualification form in mid- October, and received an e-mail confirmation that my line qualified about ten days later. Whew! (Not only does your service area have to pass the test, so does your individual phone line.)
Being understandably anxious, I rang up the ADSL folks at BellSouth to see what the time frame might be. I got the expected reply, essentially “We have your order. We’ll call you…” I even called twice, just to check the consistency of their answers. Both asked when had I received the online confirmation. One said expect 6-8 weeks. The other said 3-4 weeks. Bummer…
The other bummer will be paying an early- cancellation fee on the ISDN line. Last October, they had a special and waived the $200 installation fee (for which an engineer was required only to tie a tag with the ISDN numbers to the end of the wire pair at my house) in exchange for a 2-year commitment.
But, hey! Switching to ADSL, I’ll recoup the penalty and the cost of the ADSL modem and installation in only 6 months! And I won’t have to fork over an additional $1K a year for a second phone line! And I’ll be slurping down web pages and files at over 25 times the speed I am now! Baaahaha!
The initial roll-out for BellSouth ADSL is limited to Atlanta, Birmingham, Charlotte, Fort Lauderdale/South Florida, Jacksonville, New Orleans, and Raleigh. If you’re not in one of those BS markets, you’ll have to wait a while longer.