[Culturechat] Re: [Idyllchat] DSL

[Jerry Clancy]

Russ,

See the interspersed notes below.

At 10:24 PM 5/9/2006, Russ Crum wrote:
>You may have the credentials to tout much of what you claim (e.g. 
>chaired the IEEE 802 standards committee).

Well, it's actually a bit more than that. Subsequent to that I was a 
member of two different municipal cable TV committees for several 
years in Minnesota and chairman of another one here in Jersey. In 
between those appointments I was a vp of engineering for a division 
of what is now Time-Warner that was responsible for developing the 
delivery of home electronic services and full-motion video on demand 
to the cable systems.

>However, I think many of your statements do not hold up to scrutiny. 
>I have DSL even though I could have Comcast, which has it's own host 
>of problems since it is the 500 pound gorilla in the area. I 
>regularly check my speed using the same web sites that the everyone 
>else can use. e.g. Megapath, Speakeasy. My download speed normally 
>comes in at 1.8-2.3 Mbps and upload speeds at 420-440 kbps. Those 
>are a far cry from the 100 Kbps that you claim DSL actually 
>provides!! Incidentally, I do not have "pro" level of DSL service 
>available and also pay only about 1/2 as much as Comcast subscribers 
>do. Admittedly, the cable service is faster, but I really don't feel 
>deprived at the speeds I have. Incidentally, we have two and 
>sometimes three computers running on the internet simultaneously at 
>my home with these speeds. FYI, I am about 13,000 feet from the C.O.

I never said DSL can't perform but, to do so, some of the typical 
variables have to change to get decent performance at longer 
distances, for example: high-speed trunking between the C.O. and the 
neighborhood distribution hubs; the addition of repeaters and 
amplifiers (which introduce noise and therefore packet error rates); 
new builds (ie, in relatively new developments) or rebuilds (new 
wire) or conditioned lines; newer modems with more sophisticated and 
higher performing modulation techniques. In some urban, high-rise and 
dense suburban situations, where the high number of potential drops 
can justify the cost of new wire and equipment, the phone company may 
do this and the result is nice, clean, heavier-duty copper. Do some 
or all of these things and you can achieve higher transmission rates. 
However, this is far from typical, particularly for older (20+ years) 
suburban neighborhoods where the phone companies have been loathe to 
rebuild, particularly "the last mile".

The problem is, given the limitations of twisted pairs,  it never 
made economic sense for the companies to do this ( the same reason 
you rarely ever see "overbuilds" with a second cable company coming 
into the same area). So they were stuck trying to compete with cable 
using, in some cases, a 50-year-old infrastructure. The result was 
DSL performance in those neighborhoods that was so-so to poor to 
non-existent. In our case, about 10,000 feet or so from the C.O., the 
copper was so bad it all had to be replaced several years ago, and 
this was a 23-year-old neighborhood with underground utilities (cable 
and phone), and it still can't support DSL. And our Trenton office 
which did use DSL for several years found it troublesome to install 
and maintain, with so-so service and expensive (business rates). Of 
course, with cable now threatening their core business, Verizon is 
now hell bent for leather building new fiber networks to the 
consumer. If DSL were enough, they wouldn't be doing this.

>In your rant you also failed to mention the technical issue of cable 
>subscribers sharing a fixed bandwidth in their areas. I have had 
>several Comcast subscribers mention to me the noticeable slowdown in 
>their internet service in the evenings when other subscribers on 
>their local net come on line. That is an issue that DSL people do 
>not have to deal with.

A fair point that can be a problem in a badly-engineered system with 
too many drops per trunk/link. In fact, it happened here some 5-6 
years ago and Comcast split the trunk so that each one now has only 
half the drops it did before and this has not been an issue since. In 
a properly designed plant this shouldn't be a significant issue. 
There is a trend, however, to much more bandwidth-intensive 
applications like video clips.

It also raises some questions regarding the efficacy of phone service 
over cable. Essentially, you are placing an inherently synchronous 
service inside a distinctly asynchronous one, and one (CSMA/CD, or 
"Ethernet") which tends to have disastrous response times under heavy 
loading (say, 50% of capacity). If the "voice packets" can't get out 
in time due to local loading, they don't make it in time to get 
reassembled at the destination, so they get dropped and you start 
sounding like you're talking from the moon. Yes, it's cheaper but I'm 
in a wait-and-see mode on this one.

By the way, you missed one of the real selling points for DSL: 
security. The "star" nature of the topology means that no one is 
sharing your line (or, more accurately, circuit), unlike cable where 
all the neighborhood packets fly by your modem, allowing "packet 
sniffer" software to read them. Rarely a problem, but it's one of the 
reasons you should never put credit card info in emails or unsecured 
HTTP (browser) connections. Of course, this advantage could well 
disappear in the newer fiber builds depending upon how they are 
implemented, particularly in the "last mile" (does everyone get their 
own personal strand or tap into a common one?).

>One of the reasons I chose DSL was the ability to dial in with our 
>laptop from almost anywhere in the US when we are traveling. I don't 
>know if that has changed, but at the time I signed up for DSL, that 
>was not an option for Comcast subscribers.

I haven't checked this but, as I recall, I can access my mail now 
from any browser anywhere. In my case it's moot because, instead, I 
use a VPN (virtual private network) to "take over" my entire system 
from any remote browser when I'm away.

Bottom line is this:

* Yours in not, IMHO, the typical suburban experience
* Irrespective of price, DSL trumps voice modems
* Cable trumps DSL
* T-1 and T-3, partial or otherwise, trumps cable (but is priced prohibitively)

I've copied the Idyll CultureChat group so you could reply there 
because, should anyone wish to continue this thread, I suggest it be 
done there so we don't further bore or confuse the heck out of everyone else.

Jerry