 |
 |
Like Dennis, I was an early customer of TCI-METS -- number 2 or so on the system; I've had residential broadband continuously since summer 1995. East Lansing was the envy of bandwidth junkies everywhere; we had one person from Palo Alto drooling with envy and accusing us of mistaking ISDN for Ethernet speeds. As Dennis observes, since then the world has discovered "broadband" but the commercial offerings are decidedly slowed than a decade ago. I've had the MSU ACD DSL service for a couple of years now with mixed results. I had the 2 meg service but never achieved better than 1.5 meg, so I downgraded to the 1M. When the service works, performance is rarely a concern. (However, I do not meter SSH keystrokes; I'm more interested in how fast Web pages paint or how quickly I can upload or download a large file.) It would be nice to get back to the 10 meg service I had in 1995. My main concern has been reliability and service. I went through a period where I had numerous outages. The techs were helpful and knowledgable, but were unable to pin down the problem. Alas, the service hours do not align with the nighttimes and weekends that you use residential broadband, so I've had literally days of outages, which greatly diminishes the value of the service for me. After a while I began to suspect the DSL modem itself, but when I took it into ACD for testing on more than one occasion, it passed just fine. Eventually a tech ended up swapping out the modem, and I have had virtually zero failures in the months since then. I continue to believe that that modem had an intermittent problem or was marginal but close enough to spec to pass tests. I guess the real question is "compared to what"? Whether it's Comcast or SBC or a CLEC, even if they offer 24 hour tech support, will that translate to a more reliable service? That I can't answer. /rich On Mon, 22 Nov 2004 12:53:34 -0500, Dennis Boone <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > > > > The line quality is not ACD's fault, and does significantly affect > throughput. In my neighborhood (closer to 15000' out), we're all > lucky to get 800k down, 400k up, even with the newer technology ACD > is installing today. In fact, if you're considering DSL service, > it's worth asking the provider to look at a few other customers in > your area to see what rate they're getting. > > Latency, however, is a different story. When I first subscribed to > the ACD service, latency was quite good. To reduce problems caused by > DoS attacks, ping floods caused by worms, etc, ACD made some changes in > routing, filtering or ???. Post changes, the latency is as described. > I also find this annoying, working as I do through SSH connections > most of the time. > > I'm particularly bitter about DSL throughput, as I was getting nearly > 6 MB each direction at the end of the METS era, and after that kind > of service for many years, discovering that the best available today > is so poor, when "broadband" is the big push, was very frustrating. > > One advantage of ACD/MSU service is being in the MSU address space. > The cable system can't give you that. > > De >