When I first moved into my current home, it was made abundantly clear to me that the phone company was only capable of providing 1536 by 896 kilobit service to my house. I accepted this at the time, because it was a familiar service, I already had the device, and because mail delivery had been working. When the service started having trouble staying connected for more than an hour or so at a time, I contacted the Telco and blew through two modems while troubleshooting every possible avenue. They eventually adjusted some settings on the DSLAM and everything was reliable with the modem/gateway they'd sent.
The main problem I had was that this gateway was a significantly worse device than what I had bought when I was at my previous house. I was tempted to switch back, but I decided to leave it in. Fast forward a few months though, and almost every time I'm at home for an extended period of time, I spend my time shopping for modems and looking at the services and rates provided by the cable company.
Unfortunately, I'm kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place with these two options. I absolutely hate the cable company, and it would be reasonably accurate to say that everything about them is terrible. In two different places I've lived (in town), in no particular order, I found that…
- The Cableco loves the idiot fee, and they mention it every single time you try to call them for assistance.
- The Cableco's network likes just randomly killing modems, we owned three different ones at one place.
- The Cableco thinks that a week without service is acceptable. It has happened at least once at each place I've lived.
- The Cableco thinks that multiple weeks at a time with intermittent service is okay.
- You will pay for a certain amount of performance, and the cableco will never actually deliver that speed to you.
- Last, but not least, the cableco is charging insane rates for business-class connectivity. 7m/768k is $75/mo, or more than twice what I'm paying The Telco right now, and they tentatively won't even sell this to me, because my housemate is using their residential service.
- Also, their residential service has a transfer quota.
Granted, the Telco also has a transfer cap, but at 1536/896, it's almost physically impossible to run through the transfer quota. For fun, I called them up and they are perfectly willing to migrate my account to a business account. Unfortunately, the reason I'd called was to find out about bonded service, so I could get 3072/1792 speeds, and they do not have any open ports on which to connect a second line. They did mention that an advantage would be the lack of a transfer quota, but I declined.
However, I recently looked at some information about line quality and signals, and its possible my line will support up to 12160 by 1276 kilobits per second. I investigated this and it turns out there's no denying my modems could probably sync with the DSLAM at 12/1 or so. This is true even though the thing is set up on ADSL or ADSL2, but apparently it was very common for the previous ISP to set up remote terminals that were fed by T1 lines, with an absolute max of 1536/896 kilobits per second transfer speed. (Probably because T1s themselves are limited to 1544 kilobits per second.)
This set up is truly good news. If my line was CO fed and was truly so far away that distance made 1.5 megabits the fastest speed available, then that would be the case always, except that far in the future, I would probably be on 1.5 megabit VDSL2. With this arrangement, however, The Telco simply needs to drop in a better DSLAM that is fed by a fiber and I can revel in the joy of some pretty good connection speeds. VDSL2 has better distance coverage, and higher speeds at nearly all distance, so I think we're talking about speeds at about 20 by 5 megabits (optimistically, of course) and the impression I get, but nobody will just tell me what's happening, is that when a fiber-fed VDSL2 DSLAM is in operation, I should be able to get a bonded pair, meaning I may see total speeds of nearly 40/5 or 40/10.
The trick is figuring out how long I can hold out at 1536 by 896 kilobits per second. It's not a lot of speed, and even throwing a lot of money at local equipment designed to help route traffic more efficiently through such a narrow pipe doesn't really help much. Don't get me wrong – it makes me feel better, but it's nearly no actual help because no matter how you cut it, it's simply not enough throughput for a bunch of computers. For now, my strategy is going to be to mention to the Telco nearly every single week I'd use a faster connection if it were available. The question remains though: how long can I really hold out, or, I suppose, what could I do that uses less network throughput in the meantime.