Hard Cider Index

by Mike Juhaus

The title of this article, though accurate, is a bit of a red herring. The reason you won't be saving any of the time you normally spend on the Net is because of all the additional surfing opportunities that having high-speed home access will afford you. Whether it's downloading that 25MB Starwars Trailer for the 5th time (at 3 minutes and 15 seconds a pop), streaming video from the BBC news site or clicking for the first time on all those marginal links that used to fall into your "might be interesting but is it worth the wait" category, you'll find that DSL affords you new, high-bandwidth ways to waste time online.

The Circumstances

I was beginning to spend more time in the evenings at home using the Internet to get work done. This was growing into a problem for the other household members as I was tying up our single phone line with my 56Kbps modem. This meant either getting a second phone line or opting for an online service that would not tie up the phone - namely high-speed DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) or Cable access. I had heard that DSL and Cable access charges were expensive, but decided to check out the options in any case and see what availability was like in my area.

Turned out not to be that expensive after all. About $40 per month for Cable and $40 per month for DSL (ASDL actually - meaning asymmetric or faster downloads than uploads). Cable was not yet available in my area so I opted for Basic ADSL with PacBell. PacBell is the major supplier where I live and access through them is much much cheaper than the small ISPs that offer DSL. There are several connection options you can choose from PacBell ranging in price from $40 up to $328. The more expensive options buy you faster access and more features (usually in the form of more static IP addresses - good if you have a small LAN etc. However there are cheaper ways to connect a small LAN). The basic consumer package guarantees access speeds ranging from 384 Kbps -1.5 Mbps download and 128 Kbps upload. The speed depends on how far you are from a PacBell central office (whatever this is) in your area. The closer you are the faster your connection, and if you are over 3 miles away you cannot get the service at all. We are placed just under one mile away and have been clocking in at around 1.1Mbps to 1.2Mbps with bursts over 1.5Mbps. In addition for $10 more you can get unlimited Internet access with PacBell. PacBell also partners with ISPs so you may be able to get your DSL from PacBell through your current ISP. We placed the order with PacBell and had an appointment for them to come out in 10 days (the soonest available time).

Setup and Installation

PacBell must come out to your house to set things up for you. If you sign up for one year with them the substantial installation fee is waived (there is a $75 charge for early cancellation). You will need a ASDL modem, onboard Ethernet and a POTS Splitter in order to get up and running. You can purchase these items as a package from PacBell for about $200 and the person that comes out to setup the service will also set these things up for you. Most consumers would be wise to opt for the the complete package.

The way DSL works is that parts of the telephone line that aren't being used for standard telephone signals are used to carry the DSL signals. This portion of the telephone line must be split off from the regular line and routed to your ASDL modem. This is what the POTS Splitter does routing one line to your ASDL modem and then onto the computer and one line to service your existing phone lines.

The service person from PacBell came in the late afternoon of the appointed day. Although a "PC" person, he knew his way around a Mac and its operating system. In fact he had done an installation on my particular model of Mac only a week earlier. All in All the installation and setup went off with out a hitch and took about 2 hours. It wouldn't have even taken that long except that the poor fellow had to crawl around in the several foot high space under the house to access an awkwardly placed junction box. After the installation I got down to the task of giving my new four lane highway to the Internet, a workout.

Performance

The performance of the DSL connection is simply amazing. Web pages almost pop up on the screen. Files download at a phenomenal pace compared to the iMac's 56K modem I had been using. The first site I visited is located in Canada and is a place you can test your DSL connection speed by downloading different sized files. The site calculates the elapsed time that a download takes and what rate of speed your connection achieved. I consistently got a download speed of about 1Mbps when downloading a 1MB file.

Now it was time for something fun. So I headed off in search of the StarWars trailer at Apple's web site - at 25MB download. It took 3.15 minutes to download the trailer by DSL, 1hour and 42 minutes using the 56K modem. Large Mp3 music files downloaded at a consistent rate that hovered right about 1.5Mbps, or about 30 times faster than the modem. I also ran some more scientific performance tests on web page access which you will find detailed in the graphs directly below.

Some caveats about performance. We lucked out being so close to a PacBell central office - only 0.9 miles away. The further away you are from this central office the more your performance will suffer, according to PacBell If you are more than 3 miles away you will not be able to get the service at all. But to get the very highest rates of performance (1Mbps and above) it is important to be close. Another caveat is that DSL will not remove remote server or Net congestion performance bottlenecks. I have to admit though that such performance hiccups seem a lot less annoying when most of the information is streaming so fast into your computer.

Conclusion

In the next year or two I am convinced that most of us will be connecting to the Internet using high speed connections. Is it time for you to jump on the high-bandwidth bandwagon? For me it was. A DSL connection greatly speeds up my work day (though perhaps not my "play day"), frees up a phone line and is always at the ready without the need to dial-up. All this at little more that the cost of a standard dial-up account and a second phone line. If you are only a casual user of the Internet you might want to wait until prices come down even further. I am sure they will as high speed access services become even more pervasive, competition heats up between DSL and cable and more providers come online. However if you rely on the Internet every day to communicate or do research a DSL connection will more than pay for itself.

Do you have DSL or a Cable access? I'd like to hear about your experience. If you have cable what kind of download speeds are you seeing? Post your info on the community bulletin board or email me.

Mike runs a small internet based company in Silicon Valley