Byte by Bite

AT&T Saus 10% More in County Will Get DSL

by Marv Dealy

Although unable to attend the meeting, I’ve spoken with several who did, and the gist of what was presented was: “yes, we’re covering about half the county with DSL now; yes, we’re going to add about 4,000 new DSL customers in the next year (no starting date for that year was given), but we won’t tell you who we’ll offer service to or when. It’s a secret.”

I’ve heard reports from different sources that seem to confirm that, if AT&T wanted to, they could light up all of the eastern part of Pine Mountain Lake with DSL sometime later today. The equipment is all in place at the POP by the tennis courts, but the switches haven’t been turned on because the order hasn’t been given to do so.

That means all you good folks East of the lake could have DSL right now, but someone at AT&T hasn’t given the go-ahead.

But wait, it gets better. Business partner Bob Oakley has repeatedly applied on-line to sign up for DSL, and on some days has been confirmed only to have the confirmation later rejected, sometimes the same day. He presented correspondence to this effect to the AT&T representatives at the presentation, which was arranged by Mark Thornton.

A glimmer of hope can be found in that Mark has become a broadband believer, just having recently managed to get DSL installed at his home. Mark told me that all this time he thought that government PDFs downloaded so slowly because they were, well, government PDFs. I hope Mark will pursue the expansion of DSL in our neck of the woods as assiduously as he has pursued other matters hereabouts.

Access to or lack of fast Internet access, after all, impacts us all, whether you’re retired and use the Internet to maintain contact with friends and family, or whether you’re a business person who needs the fast connectivity and ease of use for VPN or VOIP applications or large file transfers or telecommuting, or especially if you’re a student, training to compete in a world where more people in Iceland (per 100 subscribers) have broadband than anywhere else in the world.

While we’re talking about DSL, you 15 faithful readers will remember the story of all the time and money we’ve spent trying to get reliable broadband Internet access at our offices, going way back to a shotgun modem that used three dial-up accounts, progressing through ISDN, then to a variety of DSL and T-1 accounts provided by several different groups – all of which promised the moon and ultimately delivered only empty carpet bags – and finally to the T-1 provided by the phone company.

We figured that hey, if you go to the source you ought to get reliable service. But no; the T-1 from the phone company was the most unreliable of the lot. I will say they spared no expense trying to get our connection to work – I’ve said before they could have strung us a fiber connection to the sun for less money.

In any event, after 15 months of trying and trying to work with the phone company to get the T-1 to work we gave up and pulled the plug, switching our primary service to a WildBlue satellite connection with a phone company-provisioned SDSL as a backup.

The satellite worked as advertised; up to 1.5MB down and about 256K up on a good day. Weather didn’t affect our satellite signal nearly as much as it did the T1 – which routinely went out when it rained – but the upload speed left something to be desired. We routinely have to upload some pretty darn big files in connection with our work with Hewlett Packard, and having gotten used to 1.5MB upload speeds when the T1 did work, the satellite quickly showed its limitations. On the other hand, the backup DSL didn’t have enough bandwidth to support multiple people online simultaneously, particularly if they were using VPN hookups, trying to flip slides in a Webinar, surf the Internet and email all at the same time.

So, I got on the phone with the DSL people from the phone company yet one more time, and ordered a second DSL line for the office. The theory was that we could use an assigned address on each computer, thereby aiming each at a certain DSL modem, effectively spreading the useage over two accounts and giving enough bandwidth so that we could perform as needed.

Don’t you know at the time the installer came to put the wiring in for the second DSL account he asked why we hadn’t turned up the speed on the first account. After picking my teeth back up off the floor I said uh, what do you mean. He said he’d just put a DSL into a residence across the street from our office that was clocking a good 1.5MB down; why was ours capped to 416K?

I responded I didn’t know and after a flurry of phone calls and a number of instances of my being assertive on the phone we finally hooked up with a woman at the phone company who said she’d “see what she could do.” That turns out to be a lot, as our first DSL is now clicking along at around 5MB download and about 500-700K upload. I was on the phone while this lady did her thing, which turns out to be making settings on a computer program that chokes or opens up the signal to any certain phone number, depending on a number of criteria.

The lady said she couldn’t get ours turned up to 6MB, evidently because we’re too far away from the central office.

An aside: it used to be that DSL was offered out to 18,000 feet (as the wire is strung) from the central office. That was downgraded to 15,000 feet, and now some say as little as 12,000 feet, meaning the company isn’t required to turn your DSL on now in a location where some time ago they would have been. Or, as a gentleman who bought a home on Pine Mountain Lake discovered when trying to get the existing DSL switched into his name, the new definitions mean that “well, we don’t offer it there any more, buster.”

Just what does a 5MB download speed allow? A good example would be Microsoft Windows updates. Windows users are well acquainted with the frequency that Microsoft patches their barn, requiring you to stop what you’re doing and download a really, really big file. With a slow dialup connection this may take all day. Sidekick Jason Niedens reported recently that he was able to download a Service Pack 2 update for a customer in under 5 minutes.

Think about that next time you hook up your creaky barbed-wire provided dialup connection. If you want to check the speed you are getting out of your Internet connection, you can get an rough test at www.speakeasy.net

Look in the lower right corner, and click on the Speed Test link. A new page will open, with a list of cities on the left. Click on one, and a graphical demonstration will give you your download and upload connection speeds. When comparing to 5MB download, remember that this display will read 5,000 or better, a dialup connection will display somewhere between 22 and 50.

That’s it for this month from The Computer Guy — e-mail me any rants at marv.dealy@throck.com For your review, these columns are posted on our web site at www.throck.com/articles

Marv Dealy founded Throckmorten Enterprises in 1988 in San Francisco and moved the company to Big Oak Flat in 1996. The company has branches in Boise, ID and Sutter Creek, CA. Throckmorten provides support to companies such as Hewlett Packard and The Griffin Company in producing, conducting and tech supporting on-line, on-demand or live events or “webinars,” in addition to marketing, graphic design, web design, computer lessons and repair and upgrades (Mac or PC), and network mending. Big Oak Flat office open Monday-ish thru Friday-ish, 8-ish to 5-ish. Phone 209 962-7308