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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gerald Walls who wrote (29207)	9/6/1999 6:41:00 PM
From: RTev	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

OT Though it is supposed to be available it looks like Useless Worst used a cheap ass method of putting in lines in this fast-growing area ten years ago and my line doesn't meet ASDL requirements because of it. Ah, but as a US West DSL customer, I can assure you that you'll have even more to complain about once they do make DSL available. <g> But the problem might not be that they used a "cheap" method of putting in lines, but that they used a method that didn't account for this then-unexpected technology. My newsgroup reading on the subject tells me that a frequent problem in new neighborhoods is, of all things, having fiber-optic lines too close to your house. Instead of carrying the copper pair all the way from your house to the (often distant) CO, the telephone companies added what seemed like a nifty bit of technology a decade ago. They terminated the copper from a couple dozen houses in a small device (a DLC) that modulated the voice signals into high-quality digital signals and then carried those and other area signals to the CO as digital signals on fiber or other high-rate data lines. It's great for voice and modemed data. It doesn't work with DSL since DSL is carried on high frequencies that are intentionally filtered out as noise by the DLC devices. (At the time, this seemed like a feature not a bug, since it would improve the voice quality on lines to get rid of such noise.) Here's a discussion of the problem: webproforum.com It's one of the ironies of new technologies that neighborhoods with older wiring are often better suited to the new DSL technology, since they're more likely to have the direct connection of copper between the user's home or business and the telco central office. There is some good news in all this, however. Most sprawled-out suburban houses are too far away from the CO to qualify for DSL even if they did have a pure copper direct connection. But once the neighborhood DLC is replaced with something that is able to handle DSL's ranges, the distance measurement would be from your house to the nearby DLC, so you'd be far more likely to qualify.