[PLUG] DSL options in Portland

Russell Senior russell at personaltelco.net
Wed May 19 19:46:43 UTC 2010


Sorry for being late on this thread, I just discovered that my
subscription was suspended about a week ago for excessive bounces (/me
shakes an angry fist, perhaps prematurely, at SpiritOne/Aracnet's new
spam filter).

All of the phone copper in Portland (proper) pretty much is owned by
Qwest.  They are required to lease that copper to competitors in
various ways, so you have options for ISP (the people who take your
bits, and pass them to the rest of the intarweb and back again).
There is an exception: the newer faster DSL that they advertise is
from fiber-to-the-node fed DSLAMs (that is, they run fiber to your
neighborhood, the put the DSL gear in a small closet on the curb and
the rest of the way to your house is over the old twisted pair copper)
and they are not required to allow other ISPs access to that service.
If you get one of the distributed DSLAMs in your neighborhood, you
suddenly don't have a bunch of options you had before.

The bytes-per-second number that your application gives you typically
is going to be "payload" information.  That is, not the raw bitrate,
but the amount of information that you care about being delivered, not
including the packaging information that helps get it there.  Because
there is some overhead in packet headers, mentally I usually multiply
by 10 to get the equivalent bit-rate.  You are getting something like
20-30 megabits per second from Comcast.  If you were extremely lucky,
you might be able to get a bonded service (two DSL pairs) from Integra
for in the neighborhood of $100/month.  The speed would depend on you
being close enough to the DSLAM in a Qwest central office, but my
understanding is that the bonded service tops out at about 20Mbps.
Your CO is probably the one up near Denver and Lombard.  I wouldn't
count on it.

If all you care about is cost and speed, you aren't going to beat
Comcast in the near term.  

FWIW, I care about more than cost and speed.

I want a publicly-owned fiber last mile, where I get cost, speed *AND*
freedom.


-- 
Russell Senior, President
russell at personaltelco.net



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