Dan Butler's
TNPC Newsletter

Digital Subscriber Line - It Rocks!

by T.J. Lee

One thing every Virtual Office worker needs is a fast Internet connection. When I moved to Central California and ordered new phone lines for my home office I was very excited to learn that I "might" be within the loop necessary to get a DSL (digital subscriber line) for Internet access.

In non-technobabble terms, if you live in the wrong place you can't get DSL but if you live in the right place you can. And if you live right between the right spot and the wrong spot you might. I was in this twilight zone between the right and wrong spots.

Why is DSL worth having? Well, in my new local area DSL (technically an Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line or ADSL) meant getting a Pacific Bell phone line that allowed me to connect to the Internet at 384+ Kbps downstream (me getting stuff from the Internet) and 128 Kbps upstream (me sending stuff to the Internet). Quite a jump from 28.8 on a dial-up modem, no? Not only that, I can use the DSL line to talk or send faxes on while I'm surfing the Net. This let me eliminate a phone line without crimping my virtual employee routine. Too cool.

This cost me $200 for installation (a nice technician came out to the house and plugged in a router while I installed the NIC card he gave me) plus $49.95 a month. The $49.95 includes PacBell being my ISP and giving me a couple of email mailboxes and a free personal Web page -- the usual ISP stuff. Without ISP service the DSL connection would have cost me $39.95 a month.

So $200 for a router and a NIC (rip-off? a bit but doable) and $49.95 for connection and ISP. I was already paying $21.95 a month with PRIMENet and I could drop a phone line that costs about $20 a month minimum. If you write off the installation as a sunk cost my connection costs go up $8 a month. $25 a month if you amortize the install over the first 12 months. My connection speed increases by about 20 times. I ordered DSL in a New York minute.

Then I ran into this good spot, bad spot stuff. Seems I was right on the border. The DSL sales people said that engineering would check it out and get back to me in a week or 10 days. I started getting nervous because I've run into this "a week or 10 days" phenomenon before. Whenever someone says to you "a week or 10 days" what they usually leave off is that it's a week or 10 days -- from whenever you ask. I dutifully call back in a week only to be told it'll be another "week or 10 days". The next time I'm told this I complain, get nowhere, call back and the next sales person actually reads my file through to the end and finds out that when the order was put in sales didn't tell engineering what phone number was being upgraded to DSL. Engineering asked for the phone number and there the file sat. So the phone number was passed along and I was told to check back... in a week or 10 days.

Finally, I'm told engineering has gone out to my neighborhood, everything checks out, and I'm scheduled to get my DSL in two weeks. A week later a nice phone person shows up at my door and tells me he's going to check to see if DSL works on my line. Hmmm, sales told me this was a done deal but this guy begs to differ. He does his phone thing and tells me it looks very doubtful that DSL will work. I'm crestfallen. He shows up again the next day and says he realigned the dilithium crystals (well, it sounded something like that) and that DSL would be okie-dokie after all. I'm elated.

The next day is my scheduled install date. I get a phone call from PacBell at 10:00 AM and the DSL office tells me that DSL won't work reliably in my area and they're checking into alternatives and I should hear from them, oh, in a week or 10 days. At this point I'm no longer worried about the Year 2000 bringing down the phone system. I figure the phone company is fully capable of self-destructing at any second all on their own.

A half-hour later I get a call from the DSL field tech that tells me he's on his way over to install my DSL. Alice, having fallen through the looking-glass, could not have been more confused as I was. Anyway, the technician shows up and the actual install is anti-climatic. He fiddles with the wall plug so I have one phone line to the router and one to an actual phone, I add the NIC card, we plug it in and I'm on the net. No dialing, just an addictive "always on" connection.

The NIC card that the phone company provided has the router plugged into it and my original NIC card is hooked to my hub and using ICS I can get out to the Internet from any computer on my small network. Very nice indeed. Next time some security issues involved with that "always on" connection.