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Sometimes, you can't win for losing: Ask Al Gore, or a DSL subscriber. DSL is becoming the totally twisted-pair loser of telcos and third-party service providers everywhere. Just one year ago, DSL installations for Internet access were loudly touted as soon to surpass cable, which was being recast as the know-nothing technology for the boob-tube clueless. PR flacks for DSL trotted out cable horror stories as proof that the folks who brought you "Gilligan's Island" reruns were lost at technology sea.
Before the dawn of Internet time, DSL was seen as a way to catapult phone companies into the lucrative cable TV business. As a bonus, DSL gave telcos some central-office-switch relief; for, unlike ISDN, DSL separated out the voice traffic from the data traffic. But the telco video-on-demand race was quickly in the pits due to lack of customer interest. Enter the Internet. DSL was proclaimed by telcos and others to be the Next Big Thing.
Broadband DSL comes in a variety of flavors, including Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL), which uses a twisted-copper-wire pair to deliver differing downstream/upstream rates. Verizon offers a low-end consumer variant, "OnLine DSL Personal" that features between 256 kbits/sec and 640 kbits/sec downstream for $39.95 a month. If you are a big spender and need to rip and burn MP3 files even faster than that, you can spring, as I did, for Verizon's "OnLine Professional" version that ups the downstream ante to 960 kbits/sec-1.6 Mbits/sec for $100 a month.
The downstream rate remains the same for both of these consumer ADSL services-a slower 90 kbits/sec. Each service range of downstream speeds reflects how close you are to your provider's central office. Due to the fact that an ADSL modem can typically only overcome a maximum of 1,500 ohms of resistance, the longer the local loop, the less the throughput. And, of course, there are those nasty issues of line noise, PC speed, crosstalk between wires, and the like, all of which will happily and parasitically sponge up your ADSL throughput.
Verizon, as other DSL providers, loves to dis cable ISPs by saying that because those TV guys use shared-wire technology, the more people that jump on the "Lost in Space" rerun party line, the slower it gets. Or, as Verizon proudly trumpets, "The (cable speed) capacity available to any one user inevitably drops. DSL technology provides a dedicated service over an existing local connection to the Verizon serving office near you. This means that you don't have to share your local-access connection with other users."
The last time I checked my calculator, the difference between 640 kbits/sec and
256 kbits/sec (for Verizon's "OnLine DSL Personal" service) was a whopping 60%. Moreover, as a Verizon "Online Professional" DSL subscriber, I have clocked downstream rates via DSLreports that range from a high of 1.288 Mbits/sec to as low as 675 kbits/sec off the same remote test server. So where's the "dedicated service" beef?
If coax cable usually has a bandwidth of 30 megabits per second, why do we hear horror stories about some users getting only about 350 kbits/sec, or even less, downwind? That 30 Mbit/sec cable uses a 10 Mbit/sec 10Base-T Ethernet port at the user's PC, which immediately cuts its speed down by a factor of three. More bandwidth-damaging, TV cable is-as DSL providers love to remind you-a party-line system. The TV cable system was not originally designed to act as a bidirectional pipe, or to provide point-to-point access. The cable companies never expected its TV subscribers would soon be sending their kids' home videos back up the wire to Granny.
Then came the deluge-Napster. No one could have foreseen what would happen when millions of MTV-nation inhabitants suddenly seized on the idea of free rip-and-burn via cable access. Internet slowdowns hit hapless subscribers like a fatty MP3 deposit slamming into a cable coronary artery. Bam! Sudden-access death from a cable-ISP heart attack. As a result of Napster, many cable ISPs have placed slow upstream-speed caps on subscribers, just as Verizon has done with its paltry 90-kbit/sec transfer rate.
Even if the cable companies originally lacked the technology or infrastructure to compete with DSL, they still had one important ingredient: money. AOL/God-help-us/Time Warner was last heard to be spending more than $4 billion to upgrade its cable plant. Other monster cable companies, like AT&T/TCI, are spending similarly huge sums of upgrade cash. And that burn rate began before the advent of interactive digital TV over cable, a phenomenon on its way to your set-top box. Between accommodating the bandwidth-hungry DTV signal and the requisite return pipe for placing your Domino's order, the cable companies now have a huge new incentive for laying down fat pipes right to your tattered La-Z-Boy.
The OpenCable initiative, driven by Cable Television Laboratories Inc., is shepherding into industry existence a new generation of devices that will enable a range of interactive DTV services for cable customers. The first I-DTV cable receivers-which were demonstrated by companies like Philips-contained all the circuitry to interface a PC with a digital cable network and allow your PC to receive premium TV services.
The next generation of these cable I-DTV devices will incorporate a data-over-cable service interface specification for sending high-speed data across the Internet for broadband access.
TV cables use an unswitched tree-and-branch technology, with the main trunk continually subdivided as it snakes its way through the neighborhoods. If they need more bandwidth, the cable companies just drop another line into the area, decreasing the number of users on any particular party line. This decrease in user numbers translates into an increase in individual user speed. Another approach is for the company to dedicate another 6-MHz TV channel to carry Internet data, usually providing for yet another 30 Mbits/sec. However, in the increasingly common fiber/coax hybrid system, there are a number of strands of GB/sec fiber feeding the cable head. Just by switching on the unused fibers feeding a head, companies can instantly deliver much more cable bandwidth to either existing users or to new subscribers. Thus, when I-DTV cable with Internet access rocks onto the scene, the only thing many cable companies will have to do is light up that dark fiber they have been busily laying down all these years. It's show time!
This bringing of light can happen none too soon. DSL horror stories are becoming rampant. It looks as if nothing good will come out of the twisted-business pair known as telcos and DSL. But should this have come as any great surprise? Back when Nynex was still Nynex, before Bell Atlantic swallowed up this Northeastern RBOC, and before Bell Atlantic merged with GTE to become Lost Verizon, consumer warning signs were flying high that RBOCs could not and should not be trusted to do the right DSL thing.
Verizon's DSL service has now assumed the dubious distinction of being the worst technology I have ever had the great displeasure of using. My DSL line drops at least three times a day; the service seems to go down for an hour or more at least once a week across large swaths of the Northeast; and my DSL service suddenly and mysteriously stopped working for several days. My DSL modem would not reestablish a connection back to the Verizon CO. Numerous phone calls and three days later, the connection reappeared, only to disappear again for several hours the following day. And no one at Verizon knew how or why!
And you know what the real butt-burning "gotcha" was? On the second day of my service outage a Verizon service supervisor told me that under the terms of my service-level agreement, the company had up to five business days to restore my service. Moreover, as this was around Christmas time, restoration may have taken even longer because it was the holiday season! This is completely outrageous, and it appears from increasingly widespread user and news reports that this DSL nastiness is quickly spreading all across the United States, involving many other DSL providers.
Meanwhile, according to an ISP News report of September 1, some very angry ISPs dashed off a letter of complaint to FCC chairman William Kennard complaining that "Verizon Online, a subsidiary of Verizon Communications Inc., is offering residential customers up to 768 kbits/sec downstream and 128 kbits/sec upstream for $39.95 with a one-year contract. That's predatory pricing, as far as smaller ISPs are concerned, and subject to antitrust laws." It's also highly misleading telco PR, as the Verizon Web site has much slower data-transfer rates listed for that $39.95 service. You gotta love it: Not only can Verizon not take care of its current customers, it apparently wants to bankrupt its competition, leaving hordes of steamed-up, screwed-over users with no choice.
But you DO have a choice: to switch in droves to cable access. As soon as the cable guy comes knocking on my door, it's hello Andy, goodbye Verizon.
So do yourself a favor. If you should have a broadband choice other than DSL available to you at home, such as cable or even two-way satellite, run, don't walk, away from that hissing twisted pair. And as for you business users, if you bet your company on DSL, you might end up losing at this twisted crapshoot.
And you wonder why Americans love their TVs and hate the phone companies.
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