Is it hard to install DSL yourself?

...

DSL "can do" much higher than that. In my area, AT&T offers 1.5MB/s,

3.0MB/s, and 6.0MB/s (we have the latter and get around 5.0MB/s consistently), and I believe there are higher speed offerings in some areas either now or planned in the future. Which tiers are available does depend on how far you are from the DSLAM, which might be in a box down the street or in a central office.

The cable ads that compare their "fast" service against "slow" DSL are misleading when they compare against 1.5MB/s DSL, since in many areas much faster DSL that's comparable in raw speed to cable is available and cheaper than the cable service. Just because DSL offers a lower speed at an even lower price (which is a good tradeoff for many people that cable usually doesn't even offer) doesn't mean that it's always "slow".

It's like going to one gas station that only has premium gas (which you may or may not need), and then complaining that the station across town that has all 3 grades (with their premium cheaper than the first station) is lower octane. .

Not that cable isn't sometimes a better choice for service/speed/cost, but not always.

Josh

Reply to
Josh
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Sure you're not confusing Mb/s with MB/s?

Reply to
AZ Nomad

Probably.

Is there an "authority" that decides which abbreviation is for which measurement?

megaBITS per second

megaBYTES per second

One is VASTLY different than the other.

I believe all communication/networking throughput is rated in megaBITS per second.

Reply to
Jim Redelfs

Take your pick of authorities. The prominent ones are the ISO, IEC, IEEE, EU, and NIST. I'll leave it to you to look all those up, but IEC seems to be the most prominent. They all defer to each other and quote each other in publications.

Here's a link to a Wikipedia article that discusses bitrates:

formatting link
Common measures are: bps, Kbps, Mbps, and Gbps, depending on whether you're talking about serial printers, acoustic modems, hard drive cables, or Ethernet routers. Tbps are not too far away.

To complicate things, there are lots of people who insist that a "K" is

1024 instead of the usual 1000. They have a legitimate point in lots of cases, so the official name for that unit is "kibi" instead of "kilo".

p.s. Don't forget about "baud rates". :-)

Reply to
SteveBell

And "half duplex" / "full duplex", which almost everybody gets wrong.

Reply to
Mark Lloyd

Lower case b is bits. Uppercase B is Bytes. goofy, huh?

1000's are pretty much only used by drive manufacturers to arrive at larger figures.
Reply to
AZ Nomad

Why yes, I am; sorry about that. I'd like to say it was a single slip of the shift key, since I design computer chips for a living (integrated graphics controllers, not networking components, fortunately :-), and use *B/s more often than *b/s, but then I did it

3 more times, so it's just a plain old error.

All of the above are Mb/s (Megabits per second). I won't even get into the debate about whether they should be mebibits (Mib) instead. :-)

Josh

Reply to
Josh

Take everything I said, multiply by 8 to get Kb/s and Mb/s. :-p

WTF is a mebabit? (looking it up)... ok, powers of two so as not to be confused with K/M/G/T using powers of ten.

Goofier still.

Reply to
AZ Nomad

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