OT - DSL setup

[Ed Kolis]

Say, I was wondering if Geo or Fyron or someone else with DSL could answer this for me...

If DSL uses the regular phone line, does that mean when they wire your house for it that you can plug in any number of computers to any number of phone jacks in your house and connect to the Internet? Or do they give you one special adapter and you have to get a router, etc. to share the connection?

[Suicide Junkie]

They don't wire your house; it just runs over the existing wires.

Unless you can hear static or hissing or something in your phone, the wires will almost certainly be fine.

What you do is get a series of filters to place between your jacks and any phones. This blocks the high frequencies that you can't hear anyways, and prevents them from interfering with the modem signals.
You'll get a decent-sized modem to plug into one of the unfiltered jacks, and it does its thing with the high frequencies to send and recieve data.

You plug your computer/hub/router into the modem, and away you go.
500kb to 3megabits per second would be common download limits. Not that you can expect any one site to dish data out that fast, but you can be multitasking your traffic without problems.
The only time I managed to hit my cap of 1.5 megs/s was with a telnet session to the university in town. I was testing a program for CS class, and it hit an infinite loop with an output statement.
Thus I was flooded with gobs of text at that astonishing rate.

Real downloads from dedicated servers out there I've seen get up to 1.2 mb/s. Usually its 300 kb/s for typical websites like shrapnel forums.

Sympatico (Bell) normally gives you 2 IPs to start with, so you can hook up two computers at the same time through a hub.
If you add a third computer to the hub, however, the modem may latch onto the wrong computer, and you'll have potential troubles.
With a router, of course, the ISP sees only 1 computer, and everybody behind the router gets to share in the bounty.

Cable is basically the same.
They have slightly different physical coverage, and pricing varies by company around the same amount.
The DSL modems typically have a login/password (which routers all can handle, you just have to go into the setup functions - read your manual!)
The Cable is all automatic. Once the company has plugged in your modem's serial number as a paying customer, it will hit the ground running. Without a login needed, any decent router will do the same.

(Yet somehow, people will still manage to screw things up.)
"Can you check the power cord on your modem, please?"
"Yes, sir, your modem does need to be plugged in."
"No, sir, even though you say its been working for the Last few weeks like this, it DOES need to be plugged into the wall. You've been surfing your Cached pages for almost a month now."

[ October 01, 2003, 03:03: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]