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> Can anyone comment on experience with ASDL? Just how fast and how
> good is it? From what I can tell, it should be able to make ISDN
> virtually obsolete. Am I missing something? Would ASDL even be
> better for connecting to Cyber Corp than the ISDN I'm using now?
Hello Bill,
i write this without having myself adsl at home right now. But I'm trying to get it in the coming weeks (just talked to a tech from our phone company yesterday). I live in an area of Quebec (in Canada) where adsl has been available in many sectors since last october. I have several friends using it now. It's quite amazing, considering the other alternatives.
To answer your question, yes isdn IS obsolete where adsl is available. However, there are a few things to know:
-at least here in Canada with CRTC regulations, the customers home must be within 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) from the central. The reason is that the adsl passes in the same copper wire as your phone line (when i say the same, i don't mean an equivalent one aside your existing line, i mean the *same*). Over 3 miles, the phone line require some electrical "compensators" (don't know in french, neither in english) to preserve voice quality. However, for adsl to work on the same wire, there must be NO such compensators on the line. Here, the phone company as said they will build "mini-centrals" to be able to serve adsl in areas currently too far from actual centrals. It will take time and money to implement however.
-you get a single ip address with each adsl account. If you think about running multiple machines, you can go with various solutions. Either get 2 adsl accounts or build an intranet with fake internal ip addresses. On the Mac platform which I know better, there are software solutions to build such intranets. However, a hardware solutions (including an "intelligent" router) would be better, stability-wise and performance-wise, I guess.
-quality. Officially, adsl is supposed to provide 2.2 Mbits/s download and 1.1 Mbits/s upload. Downloading, this would normally mean about 250 kb/s (say a 1 Meg file in 4 seconds). I personnally know many friends who experienced over 200k/s downloads, so it is not pure FUD from phone companies. The real question is however, what is the bandwidth of your provider to the main backbone. In our case, the Bell Canada bandwidth seems to be enormous. If you can, try to get the same Info from your Bell company too. As long as they have a good connection to the net, adsl is a great technology.
-yes adsl is the probably the best connection to things like CT (and other live internet brokers) actually. Your PC is always online like with cable modem, no need to dial like ppp or isdn. If you can get it at home, I would recommand 2 adsl connections hands down over any isdn package. If you are unsure of yourself, try for one first. I personnally plan, within 6 months maybe, to have two adsl lines, one for my Mac and one for an eventual PC I'll get to use live internet brokerage software (you understand why i read this thread ;-) ). One of the two lines will provide my normal voice line. The other one will provide my faxmodem line. Since both adsl lines will be on the same provider, I ll probably have a minimal backup dialup account elsewhere to be able to switch if I see a connection downtime with adsl (which seems to be very rare, since my 3 friends have not seen one yet in 7, 6 and 3 months respectively.
What's the point you're missing right now? It has been a great discussion topic with some of my friends here. First, adsl technology is quite recent, while ISDN is there for a long time. Even in the telecomm industry, inertia exists. ISDN is probably a cash cow for phone companies too, so only a competitive market with cable companies, satellite, etc. has pushed them to go with their best offer now.
Quite a long post I know, but writing technical details in english is not so easy for me. Sorry. Hope you won't see me as an adsl hypester after that. I have lived for 3 weeks in a friend's appartment who has cable modem and it is very interesting too. However, as long as I can say, adsl is still a better technology if you can afford it.
Ludo "the next step: cheap 100 Mbits Ethernet connection at home... let's dream again..." |
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