Previously, we learned that the "last mile" of copper from The Telco's closest switching equipment to my house is actually better than I had thought it was. When The Telco deploys VDSL2 equipment to the cabinet closest to me, I should be able to get reasonably good speeds, possibly up to 20 by 5 megabits, and bonding will become available. My working theory is that I may be able to get better performance than the cable company had been offering. (Although the bar has been raised on this front, I recently learned that the cable company has started offering 50 and 107 megabits download speeds.)
It's of course nearly impossible to know what is beyond my house, and it's not even a sure thing that the box I think feeds my house is the one that indeed does, but if it is, then the working theory is that it's fed by a few T1s, which would explain why there can only be a small number of DSL subscriptions at once in my neighborhood, and why they are absolutely limited in speed to 1536/896 kilobits per second, even though my modem reports it could connect to that box at a faster speed. (*The ten megabit link would do nothing because there's only 1.54 megabits of backhaul leading to the box.)
I have been bothering The Telco on a pretty regular basis, but I also recently learned that there are no tentative plans to consider upgrading that box for at least another three months.
Every once in a while, I wonder what other people on slow DSL speed tiers (or who are in areas that do not offer faster service) are doing with it. Every once in a while, I start to justify the speed, as though there's some alternate universe where there's a significant number of people who, here in 2014, are content to own a single computing device, maybe even a tablet like a Surface RT or iPad, and do almost no web browsing and enjoy no media on it, certainly no streaming media.
Years ago, I made fun of connections at this speed for being Granny's Internet connection. In a lot of ways, this is true, it is not very good at the kind of web services we expect these days. If you truly are just syncing a cloud document storage service with a single device and using e-mail (ideally in a client, so as to avoid the overhead of loading a web page) then I can see where the cost savings in having such a limited connection might be appreciated. Slow DSL is just about as good at moving packets, albeit at low speeds, as gigabit fibers. If the actual speed at which the data moves never affects the experience of using a device, it's easy to see how some people wouldn't notice.
Justifications aside, there are just a few pretty specific reasons why I keep the connection around, and am likely to continue doing so even if I add a cable or cellular connection.
The first of these reasons is that the Telco is under regulations to provide their services as a common carrier, which means that even though they provide my physical connection, they are required to allow another ISP to handle my connection to the greater Internet. I am not actually interested in doing this, in part because it costs more and in part because I'm reasonably happy with the Telco's ISP services, but I like knowing that they're required to allow it.
The second is that I have a static IP on this connection, which followed me from my previous house (where I had a 20M/896k connection.) I could get a static IP from the Cableco, but with lower upload speed (their base plan is 6M/768K and upload is very important to me) and at well over twice what I'm paying now. Their first reasonable plan is four times what I'm paying now, which is still twice what I'll be paying if I move my current line to a business plan. The Cable Company has also specified that they are intentionally going to make it difficult for me to have a business line installed.
The third is that when The Telco upgrades, and the longer they delay on upgrading, the higher the likelihood is that they'll install some equipment that's better when whatever is currently available. For example, if it takes another year, they could decide that new deployments based on the upcoming ADSL2++ or ADSL4 standard will provide better speeds at long distance than continuing to deploy VDSL2. They may even do things like begin providing quad-bonding equipment or replacing 1.5M ADSL infrastructure with fiber directly to houses.
I also think that The Telco has a better logo and slogan than The Cableco. Integrated DSL equipment is also a more known quantity for me than integrated cable equipment, and the integrated DSL equipment I've used both on my 20M/896k VDSL2 line and 1536k/896k ADSL line has met my requirements and provided a surprising amount of flexibility at things I want to do, compared even to standalone routers.