Verizon to Extend DSL Service in Rural West Virginia

Despite all the hype surrounding Verizon’s FiOS ultra-speed broadband technology, the telecom giant is still working to extend even basic DSL service to customers in many rural and remote regions.

As of now, much of rural West Virginia still aren’t able to access the internet at broadband speed, due to the fact that 15 of Verizon’s 142 switching centers in the state haven’t yet been equipped with DSL technology.

The company has promised to correct this deficiency by the end of December, by spending $5 million to upgrade the remaining switching centers, and bring DSL service to 38,000 phone lines in under served areas.

AT&T expands DSL service

New Washington residents will soon be able to receive DSL Internet service.

Officials from AT&T joined Clark County Commissioners Thursday to make the announcement.

The company’s High Speed to the Heartland initiative — which will be completed by early next year — will essentially bring digital subscriber line service to every central office in Indiana operated by AT&T. It’s a part of a $250 million plan the company announced earlier this year, which seeks to deliver next-generation broadband, video and voice services to its Indiana customers.

All of this, according to AT&T Indiana president George Fleetwood, is a product of a new telecommunications law the Indiana legislature passed in March — formally titled HB 1279.

AT&T along with other telecommunications, business and labor organization worked hard to lobby for the bill, Fleetwood said.

“I think it’s a really good thing for Hoosiers.”

The bill received bipartisan support. It came at the urging of Gov. Mitch Daniels, who during his State of the State address, called on the General Assembly to follow suit with at least 14 other state legislatures and update communications law.

The other 14 state updated their telecom laws in 2005. Indiana did so in 2006.

“Our new telecom law, the best in the country, is already producing results for Hoosiers: More choices for consumers and brighter economic prospects for our small towns,” Daniels said in a press release.

AT&T Indiana provides DSL to 46 rural communities. It hopes to increase that number to 79 by next year.

Commissioner Ed Meyer said he was pleased with the investment in Clark County.

“Residents of Sellersburg and Charlestown already enjoy access to DSL service,” he said. “Soon, residents in New Washington will also have this option available to them.”

Source: www.news-tribune.net

Don't Confuse Cable Broadband with DSL

Last year, a co-worker of mine called his cable company to order DSL. Yesterday, when I went to see my podiatrist, we began discussing broadband options. I told him that I had DSL at home. He said he had a broadband service with Comcast that he believed to be DSL. Obviously, my co-worker and my podiatrist, even though both are intelligent men, did not understand the difference between cable broadband and DSL.

Both cable broadband service and DSL provide speeds many times faster than dial-up, ranging from 700 kbps all the way to 10,000 kbps (10 mbps). Dial-up is capped at 56 kbps. In addition, both of these types of broadband services provide "always on" or instant Internet connections, without the need to dial up and without tying up a phone line. In most areas, cable connections are a little faster than DSL, but speeds vary from area to area and from provider to provider. However, there are some major differences between cable and DSL.

Cable broadband service is provided by your local cable company. It comes into your house via the same cable that delivers cable TV. To get connected to cable broadband service, a technician from the cable company generally must come out to your house for an installation process in which a broadband connection is split off from the TV connection. The broadband connection is then plugged into a cable modem which is then plugged into your computer or router.

With cable, it doesn't matter how close you live to cable company's office or plant. If it's available in your area, it's available at the same maximum speed to everyone, regardless of where they live within that area. What usually does matter, however, is how many others in your neighborhood are also subscribing, as you are sharing the bandwidth with them. When a lot of them are logged on at the same time that you are, you could notice a significant speed reduction.

DSL, or Digital Subscriber Line, is provided by a phone company. In general, no professional installation is needed for DSL. When you order it, your phone company turns your service on from its office and sends you a DSL modem and some filters. DSL uses a different partition of your existing phone line's bandwidth (than what is used for voice), so no extra line is needed. To get connected, you plug one end of a DSL modem into a regular phone jack and the other end into your computer or router. The filters are used to eliminate potential DSL static from phone jacks in which phones are used. These filters fit easily into the phone jacks and then the phone connections are plugged into the filters.

Unlike cable, with DSL it makes a big difference how close you live to the phone company's office. If you live too far away, you won't even qualify for the service at all. Even if you live close enough to qualify, you still might be so far out that you can only get speeds near the lower end of the range that the phone company advertises. However, you have direct line to the phone company and do not share your bandwidth with your neighbors, so it doesn't matter how many of them are also DSL subscribers or how many of them are logged on at a given time.

Terry Mitchell is a software engineer, freelance writer, and blogger from Hopewell, VA. On his blog - http://commenterry.blogs.com - he posts commentaries on various subjects such as politics, technology, religion, health and well-being, personal finance, and sports. His commentaries offer a unique point of view that is not often found in mainstream media.

Trying to gain DSL access proves taxing

The Observer finds himself yet again in one of life's Bermuda Triangles. This time it's Internet hell. What did I do in a previous life to deserve this?

I'm shopping for a provider because my friends upstairs, the ones with the wireless access I've been sharing, are moving. The gall. They leave the Observer with an appalling pair of options: Comcast, the muscle - bound monolith that charges nosebleed fees, or dial-up service, which allows me to complete my shopping run at Roche Brothers before the screen changes. (Forget satellites.)

I always thought the digital highway was supposed to be teeming with players desperate to give me superior service for a relative song. So why do I feel like a stag at the prom?

I don't live in Roosterville, by the way, so we can dispense with the argument that I'm stuck because I exist like an anchorite in the tall grass. I live in Jamaica Plain, a densely populated urban neighborhood of Boston.

Blame first goes to Verizon, which with my swollen phone bills kept sending me endless come-ons for DSL service at $14.95 for the first year. High-speed for $30. Both are slower than what Comcast provides, but cheaper, too. Regular DSL is fine for me. I have no plans to download the Lord of The Rings trilogy.

A Comcast sales representative tells me I'll pay $45.95 a month for its high-speed service, with rented modem, on top of my existing Comcast cable TV. Were I to sign up for its Internet service alone without the TV, she adds, I'd pay $57 a month. Gracious.

The Comcast defense has always been grounded on the value option -- you get a lot for your hard-earned simoleons. ``We're creating choice," says Comcast spokeswoman Shawn Feddeman.

The service, she says, comes with 50 new bells and whistles, almost none of which I want but must pay for anyway. It's all or nothing, so remind me where the choice is here?

Exhibit A is Rhapsody Radio, which lets me download over a million songs free. I don't want to download a million songs. Hell, I don't want to download one. So Comcast: How about canning Rhapsody and cutting my bill? Now that is choice.

Back to Verizon. I try to sign up for its el cheapo DSL offer only to learn I can't get DSL at all. I later reach a Verizon PR guy named Clifford Lee about my predicament. Lee eventually e-mails me that because I live over 15,000 feet from the nearest Verizon switching center, the signal is too weak for service. In short, tough noogies.

I also ask him where the other DSL holes are in Boston. He won't identify them but writes that about 80 percent of the city can get DSL service. Then I ask him when I can expect DSL. He responds he can't give me that information due to the competition. ``We try not to provide our competitors with a road map of our future technology deployment." Read never.

Continued

DSL Service Surges Past 150 Million Worldwide Subscribers

Worldwide DSL subscriptions surged past the 150 million mark in the twelve months to 31 March 2006, according to the latest data produced for the international DSL Forum by industry analyst Point Topic.


This growth of 39% in the year means that more than 43 million business and residential users selected DSL (digital subscriber line) for broadband access, with 11.5 million new subscribers signing up to DSL in the first quarter of 2006.

“DSL continues to grow with the subscriber demand for broadband residential and business services”, said Michael Brusca, chairman and president of the DSL Forum.

“This is driven by the global demand for multiple applications – including new video and voice services. The DSL Forum has been providing the tools to help service providers build the networks that employ effective management and provisioning of value-added broadband services, which has resulted in increased take and customer satisfaction.”

At the end of the first quarter of 2006, there were 22 countries with more than one million DSL subscribers – seven nations reached the figure in the twelve months to 31 March 2006.

China added almost ten million new subscribers in the 12 months to March 2006 – three million in the first quarter of 2006 alone – and is now close to the 30 million DSL subscriber mark. Both Germany (up 3.8 million) and France (up three million) now have more than 10 million DSL subscribers.

Of the established nations, with more than one million DSL subscribers as at 31 March 2006, India topped the percentage growth ranking, increasing its subscriber base by more than 700% in twelve months. Significant subscriber increases were also made in Turkey (190% increase), Mexico (99%) and Australia (84.6%).

Pakistan growth (484%) led the way in countries with less than one million DSL subscribers, with Morocco, Greece and Bulgaria all experiencing DSL growth of more than 200%.

Regionally, the European Union (EU) reinforced its position as the world’s leading DSL region. The EU added more than 17 million new DSL subscribers in the period to reach 52.8 million – at a growth of 48% – extending its global share of the DSL subscriber market to almost 35%.

Of the emerging DSL regions, a significant subscriber increase was seen in the Middle East and Africa, which more than doubled its subscriber base to reach 3.45 million – led by Turkey (up 1.84 million) and Israel (up 830,000).

Latin America reached a total of seven million DSL subscribers by 31 March 2006, and now makes up 5% of global DSL subscriptions. Brazil and Mexico accounted for 74% of the region’s total growth, adding 1.2 million and 909,000 new DSL subscribers respectively.

In North America, the USA added 5.6 million new DSL subscribers, at a growth of almost 34% – far outstripping the growth of cable modem access in the same period (up 21.9%). DSL also extended its market share in Canada, now accounting for 49% of the country’s broadband connectivity.

Fourteen established DSL nations have now achieved a market penetration of more than 20% of telephone lines delivering DSL broadband services to homes and businesses – the DSL Forum’s first stage target for a global broadband DSL mass market.

“This amazing sustained growth of DSL around the world reflects how broadband DSL is becoming essential to the average family, student and business”, continued Michael Brusca.

Source: www.mybroadband.co.za

RCN Selects Motive's Technology to Enhance Broadband Service

RCN has selected Motive’s service activation and self-service technology to enhance the company’s high-speed Internet service.

To support more than 400,000 customers spread across six regions, RCN will use Motive’s Fully Automated Service Technology (FAST) to proactively identify and troubleshoot issues and help the user resolve problems without the assistance of telephone tech support.


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This will reduce installation time, provide consistent and quality installation, and decrease RCN’s operational costs. It will also enable secure wireless device configuration on the installation of select devices.

“RCN chose Motive’s technology because of its extensive experience deploying high-speed Internet management solutions,” said Mark Chinn, RCN’s vice president of product management and pricing, in a press release.

He continued: “The ability to offer RCN customers faster, more convenient installation and support options is critical for our high customer satisfaction goals and future growth. Motive is the right choice to take us through the next generation of our Internet business.”

Motive is also providing the foundation for the successful rollout of RCN’s future services such as advanced home networking.

Provided: www.news.tmcnet.com

The changing internet

You've probably heard a bit about the ongoing net neutrality debate; it's not over, but the concept of net neutrality took a blow yesterday when a Senate committee rejected a proposal to include language requiring it in a telecommunications bill.

So what's this all about?

I'm not going to try to explain the entire arguments for and against net neutrality. But here's a brief explanation and some links.

There's an old and established idea in telecommunications called "common carriage" that's formed our sense of how telecom services work: the idea that telecoms are providing a highway (to use the most obvious analogy) on which traffic travels - phone calls and now data. They build the highway, we pay them to use it (by placing a call or by transmitting data). We can pay to have a simple low-tech access "ramp" (such as POTS, or "plain old telephone service"), or we can pay for more: from DSL to a T1. Once our traffic enters that highway, it's all handled the same way.

Network operators (the big telecoms like AT&T and Verizon and cable operators like Time Warner and Comcast) would like to change that. They would like to be able to offer premium services - so, for example, if Google wants to make a deal with them, they can have their traffic travel on newer, faster networks while my data keeps plugging along on slower routes.

At first glance, this doesn't seem like a crazy idea - if a company is willing to pay for their own special "fast lane," why shouldn't they be able to? That's a free market at work, right?

The problem is that we are talking about a market that's controlled by an oligopoly of a handful of network providers, with extremely high entry costs that make it essentially impossible for anyone else to enter it.

If you haven't been following the debate closely, here are some places where you can get both sides of the argument:

Vint Cerf, one of the people who helped design and build the internet

Contined