12-11-2012, 04:50 AM
Exactly: T1 is "commercial-grade", with the bandwidth provisioned all the way through the network, you are (more or less) guaranteed the full 1.5Mb/s, 24x7x365, no throttling, no caps, and the bandwidth is symmetrical (you can serve up 1.5Mb/s to the world, if you want).
You also get a real service level, usually 2h response and less than 4h downtime unless things are really bad.
Speed of G.lite ADSL (which is what the industry standardized on) varies with distance, but 3Mb/s (but only 640Kb/s up, the A is for "asymmetric") is possible at 17500 feet if the lines are reasonably clean. In remote areas, however, the bottleneck is the bandwidth out of the remote -- your 3Mb/s loop doesn't do you any good when you're fighting for a slice of the (massively oversold) uplink. As you'd expect, this follows density/distance; remotes out on the Red Road are fed by a bundle of T1s, but the Orchidland and Hawaiian Acres remotes seem to have a fiber uplink.
For anyone looking/guessing: a remote will have multiple cabinets (not just the green terminal head), at least one cabinet will have a connector for a portable generator, and there will be a power pedestal w/meter.
There are other (slower) flavors of DSL which the telcoms simply don't bother to deploy; SDSL will run 400Kb/s up to 25000 feet, IDSL is only 144Kb/s but has virtually no distance limitation. Either is faster than dialup, and in most cases will outperform any available wireless option.
Telcoms have always maximized their profits by "cream-skimming", which translates to "serve the highest-density areas" -- if the Feds didn't require them to bring dialtone out to the sticks, there wouldn't be any phone service in most of the low-density "ag" subdivisions. Unfortunately, these rules are outdated; "dialtone" really should be extended to include at least 1.5Mb/s, especially as Government (and the private sector) put everything online.
A few words about satellite: long latency makes it useless for online gaming, low usage caps make any kind of streaming impractical, and it tends to be wonky with the weather ("rain fade", etc). For email and other lightweight tasks, it works okay.
You also get a real service level, usually 2h response and less than 4h downtime unless things are really bad.
Speed of G.lite ADSL (which is what the industry standardized on) varies with distance, but 3Mb/s (but only 640Kb/s up, the A is for "asymmetric") is possible at 17500 feet if the lines are reasonably clean. In remote areas, however, the bottleneck is the bandwidth out of the remote -- your 3Mb/s loop doesn't do you any good when you're fighting for a slice of the (massively oversold) uplink. As you'd expect, this follows density/distance; remotes out on the Red Road are fed by a bundle of T1s, but the Orchidland and Hawaiian Acres remotes seem to have a fiber uplink.
For anyone looking/guessing: a remote will have multiple cabinets (not just the green terminal head), at least one cabinet will have a connector for a portable generator, and there will be a power pedestal w/meter.
There are other (slower) flavors of DSL which the telcoms simply don't bother to deploy; SDSL will run 400Kb/s up to 25000 feet, IDSL is only 144Kb/s but has virtually no distance limitation. Either is faster than dialup, and in most cases will outperform any available wireless option.
Telcoms have always maximized their profits by "cream-skimming", which translates to "serve the highest-density areas" -- if the Feds didn't require them to bring dialtone out to the sticks, there wouldn't be any phone service in most of the low-density "ag" subdivisions. Unfortunately, these rules are outdated; "dialtone" really should be extended to include at least 1.5Mb/s, especially as Government (and the private sector) put everything online.
A few words about satellite: long latency makes it useless for online gaming, low usage caps make any kind of streaming impractical, and it tends to be wonky with the weather ("rain fade", etc). For email and other lightweight tasks, it works okay.