Wes at Home - Play

As much as I like having a dialup connection available to test new designs, I'd started gaining weight again due to my habit of traipsing off to the cookie jar whenever the download indicator read anything over 1 minute). Thus, DSL.

Update 01/25/03
Had to get off of DirecTVDSL, so I chose SBC Yahoo! DSL. Monthly fee is $10 less than DirecTV, connection is faster (see below), but the installation process is goofy and requires modifying your existing set up far beyond what DirecTV/Telocity required. The connection is not on unless your computer is active (probably a good thing), but there is a 10-12 sec. delay before the connection is made.

Update 01/03: DirectvDSL goes belly up, so I'm forced to go with SBC-Yahoo! DSL. The good news is that it's only $39.99 per month. The bad news is that I lost my static IP and I'm probably going to get a crappy download rate and they're so pokey that I'll have to do without DSL for two weeks. Still, they gave me a free modem, waived their bullshit set-up fee, and the call center lady was pretty funny.
Update 09/02: Jeremy at DirecTV helps get the SBC problem straightened out, and has them boost my speed to 786Kbps, half of what it used to be but good enough to stop me from switching to Covad.	Update 08/02: DirecTV DSL uses SBC-ASI for DSL connections, which means a) my service went down for 10 days, b) my connection speed dropped to 384kbs, c) sitting on hold for 40 mins. for tech support.	Update: Telocity has been acquired by DirecTV. The result was an increase in cost to $49.99/month with no improvement in service. My connection goes down or the gateway freaks out at least once a month.

Choices, Choices I chose Telocity in San Jose as my provider, for the following reasons:	No one-year contract (SBC has followed suit since, although they still charge for the modem) They offer a free static IP They loan you a remarkable self-configuring gateway (no internal card or software installation) They had a fairly good reputation They answered my technical questions within four rings when I called them
The Good News DSL is pretty slick technology. Here's the silver lining:	I can use my land line to make and receive calls while still surfing the Web. Download speeds are steady, so there aren't strange delays when downloading large files Overall speed is increased and most pages load in 1-2 secs.
Harsh Realities Was DSL all I hoped it would be? No. But it has little to do with the technology itself.	The biggest letdown is that my connection speed is physically limited to 384Kb for downloads. I'm unclear on whether this is due to my living in an old neighborhood with correspondingly old telephone cabling or my distance (10,000 ft.) from the phone company's central office. While that's still 6x faster than my modem, it isn't the blazing 1500Kb/sec that I had hoped for. After checking with another DSL company which confirmed that my phone lines will not allow higher speeds, I had to resign myself to this significant but disappointing speed increase. While speed is improved overall, some downloads still take about the same amount of time. FTP transfers from Apple max out at around 36K/sec. at off-peak times (Saturday night).
Grasping at Straws I've been playing with Sustainable Software's OT Tuner control panel to modify my Open Transport settings manually.	This might give me a speed bump, since apparently Open Transport isn't configured out of the box for DSL data transfers. I doubt this will help much given that I appear to be transferring data at the maximum speed my phone line allows.