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pffan
join:2014-02-10

pffan

Member

Great we don't even have BROADBAND anymore.. Thanks C-NET

So, C-NET publishes the following article:
»www.cnet.com/news/sorry- ··· D1c318f6

That points out that you are not "BROADBAND" unless you are 25MB or higher.

Come on CenturyLink, our 1.5MB is just not cutting it in todays market! And CL is our only option, no WISP, No Cable, just SLOOOOOOW DSL from CL. Sad!!!

Ken1943
join:2001-12-30
Brighton, CO

Ken1943

Member

Anything above 56k dial up is broadband. Now that was slow.

bottleworks
@embarqhsd.net

bottleworks

Anon

"Anything above 56k dial up is broadband. Now that was slow."

Nope, not anymore. Broadband has now been redefined. 1.5M is NOT broadband. This is a good thing. This is the first step to forcing faster speeds in rural areas.
Corporate
join:2014-10-04

Corporate

Member

Re: Great we don't even have BROADBAND anymore.. Thanks C|NET

said by bottleworks :

Nope, not anymore. Broadband has now been redefined. 1.5M is NOT broadband. This is a good thing. This is the first step to forcing faster speeds in rural areas.

The redefining of broadband will make companies upgrade their networks. Companies will simply change the wording from "Broadband" to "High Speed Internet" like Verizon did with DSL in the previous redefinition.
Corporate

Corporate to pffan

Member

to pffan
said by pffan:

Come on CenturyLink, our 1.5MB is just not cutting it in todays market! And CL is our only option, no WISP, No Cable, just SLOOOOOOW DSL from CL. Sad!!!

For the record, you have not had broadband for a long time. The previous definition of Broadband was 4/1 (Down/Up).
chevyowner
join:2013-07-04
Preston, ID

chevyowner to pffan

Member

to pffan

Re: Great we don't even have BROADBAND anymore.. Thanks C-NET

Actually it was the FCC not CNET that made the change. Also CenturyLink did not have broadband under the old 4mbps/1mbps down/up as CenturyLink is 896kbps up in most areas.
political_i
join:2013-11-12

political_i to pffan

Member

to pffan
This is mainly to use the point that 20% of households do not have sufficient access and that many households only have once choice and not the "oodles of competition" Comcast claims to have.
mn_dsl_man
Premium Member
join:2015-01-18

mn_dsl_man to chevyowner

Premium Member

to chevyowner
Good point, even the max upload of ADSL2+ assuming you are within a mile of the CO or DSLAM is 1Mb. A lot of modems advertising "Supports up to 12Mb download" don't list the upload limitation.
gapmn
join:2013-11-10
Saint Paul, MN

gapmn to bottleworks

Member

to bottleworks
CL would love to upgrade the rural areas. However, the rural areas would not be willing to pay the true cost for the upgrades.

Titus
Mr Gradenko
join:2004-06-26

Titus

Member

You mean CL would not realize a timely return on that investment? Because I'm not aware of a business model that says pay a company what it would take to provide you with better service just because. If it worked that way we'd all still have dialup.

NormanS
I gave her time to steal my mind away
MVM
join:2001-02-14
San Jose, CA
TP-Link TD-8616
Asus RT-AC66U B1
Netgear FR114P

NormanS to mn_dsl_man

MVM

to mn_dsl_man
said by mn_dsl_man:

Good point, even the max upload of ADSL2+ assuming you are within a mile of the CO or DSLAM is 1Mb.

Isn't it closer to 3Mb with Annex M enabled?
ozar
Premium Member
join:2008-04-13
USA

ozar to pffan

Premium Member

to pffan
Yeah, a few weeks back I upgraded to a 25Mbps-bonded connection with 2Mbps uploads, so I had broadband for few days there but with 3Mbps upload speeds needed to meet the new broadband requirements, I'm out of the broadband loop again. I do have what CenturyLink considers to be "high speed" Internet, but personally I see it more as a moderate speed internet connection.

On the other hand, it is much better than the 10Mbps speeds I was saddled with previously.

NormanS
I gave her time to steal my mind away
MVM
join:2001-02-14
San Jose, CA
TP-Link TD-8616
Asus RT-AC66U B1
Netgear FR114P

NormanS

MVM

said by ozar:

On the other hand, it is much better than the 10Mbps speeds I was saddled with previously.

Are you in a multi-user household? I ask because I find that, for a single user, 5 Mb is indistinguishable from 25 Mb for common tasks. The main advantage of higher speed is in moving large volumes of data in minimum time. For streaming, if the device is constrained, the connection speed is only an issue if it is slower than that constraint.

In a multi-user situation, 25 Mb would probably be insufficient for six users, or more.
ozar
Premium Member
join:2008-04-13
USA

ozar

Premium Member

Yes, multiple-user household here, and I, too, noticed right away that the 25Mbps connection didn't truly feel 2.5 times as fast as the 10Mbps speed during normal usage. I download some very large files quite often though, and that's where the extra speed really begins to pay off. In every speed test I've run thus far, I am getting the speeds that they sold me, so I'm really glad of that.

Otherwise, I'd have to say the 25Mbps connection only feels about 1.5 times as fast as the 10Mbps speed that I had previously. Not sure why it works out that way.
Stunty
join:2013-09-16
Littleton, CO

Stunty to pffan

Member

to pffan
Annex M is a solution for upstream, but it will kill your downstream... This is only possible for non IPTV areas and frankly I don't upstream is that important.
The future of DSL lies in things like G.fast, vectoring, bonding... but rural area can only hope for LTE CAT3,4 or 5...
brad152
join:2006-07-27
Chicago, IL

brad152 to ozar

Member

to ozar
It could be that your maxing out the 2Mbps upload, causing TCP "lag" due to it backlogging the requests.

I personally would never accept anything lower than 5Mbps for upload.
Stunty
join:2013-09-16
Littleton, CO

Stunty to pffan

Member

to pffan
If you have a smart router you can greatly reduce the number of TCP ACK send upstream.
Only the send the highest TCP ACK sequence number and this will save quite a bit.
This is another topic. The only reason Internet connection sucks in this country is because of big corporation like Comcast and Co. They own such large footprint you are stuck with them, there is competition on any market.
gapmn
join:2013-11-10
Saint Paul, MN

gapmn

Member

said by Stunty:

This is another topic. The only reason Internet connection sucks in this country is because of big corporation like Comcast and Co.

True or False: The US is the only country that has big corporations?

True or False: Only countries that have small corporations have fast internet speeds?
Stunty
join:2013-09-16
Littleton, CO

Stunty

Member

The customer is pretty much stuck with one company, this is a problem. Having only one choice is not having a choice.
The problem is I guess the size of the country and the investment that must be done to get a 25M downstream to someone living in the middle of nowhere.

NormanS
I gave her time to steal my mind away
MVM
join:2001-02-14
San Jose, CA
TP-Link TD-8616
Asus RT-AC66U B1
Netgear FR114P

NormanS

MVM

To achieve the FCC definition of, "broadband" with DSL service would require VDSL under 3,000 feet to the DSLAM. For a rural area, that is a lot of remote hardware per customer. To get broadband on copper pair now would require an optical termination system really close to the customer. The old Bellsouth IFITL could have done it; but the equipment supplier is apparently no longer in business. Another promising deployment is fiber to MDUs; the optical interface in the wiring cabinet, and the existing copper to the units. Otherwise it is coax, or FTTH.
silbaco
Premium Member
join:2009-08-03
USA

silbaco to Stunty

Premium Member

to Stunty
Well when you live in the middle of nowhere chances are you will almost never have 2 providers unless one received government funding. Not only are rural areas more expensive to serve with less return, but the population density can often times be low enough that having 2 providers would only end up with both losing money.

Windstream actually had a pretty accurate statement about this a couple years ago when talking to their shareholders. It was basically along the lines of how their rural areas can be profitable but only because of the extremely high penetration because they are the sole provider.
pffan
join:2014-02-10

pffan

Member

The bad part is we are NOT in a rural area. Zip Code 84010 It is a fairly affluent neighborhood. I'm not sure why CL has not updated the DSLAM that is just down the street. It is currently fed by T1's and NOT fiber. The one 1/3rd of a mile down the street is FIBER fed and a lot faster. Supposedly the DSLAM is all configured just fine, they only need to run the FIBER to it. I'd like to hope that "THIS" will be the year. I'll try contacting Doug or Stephanie and see if they can look over the planning wall and see if there is anything for our neighborhood.
Everyone else in our neighborhood that wants speed goes with COMCAST, but us and our neighbors do NOT have access to COMCAST, when they put the cables in they didn't run them to our two houses. There are probably 4-5 more houses in the neighborhood that are in the same boat, ie: DSL only no access to COMCAST.

It's frustrating...

Atom90
join:2014-12-05

2 edits

Atom90 to gapmn

Member

to gapmn
said by gapmn:

CL would love to upgrade the rural areas. However, the rural areas would not be willing to pay the true cost for the upgrades.

Implying that it cost CL much to provide rural areas dsl in the first place.

What usually happened to the rural dsl folks, like me, is that they started offering dsl nearly 10 years after most of the major cities. And so the only reason why CL, Emarq, Qwest offered rural dsl is because old equipment was being replaced with newer equipment in the big cities and the rural phone lines were already in place.

They have these old dslams just sitting around, why not continue to make money with them. So the rural people get the decade old second hand equipment and CL didn't not have to buy anything new for these customers.

The fastest speed stated for my one stoplight town is 10Mbit, at least that is what the website says for a house right across the street from the CL main office. I'm currently paying $56 for a naked 1.25Mbit/.25Mbit dsl, which should be more than enough money to cover an upgrade but that money is just being used to subsidize the few competitive markets.

-A valued CL customer
mrhoogles
join:2012-03-02
Silverhill, AL

mrhoogles to pffan

Member

to pffan
i have 12mbit down and .730kbps up, connected at 15mbit down, 889kbps up, to be honest, i would really very much rather have 3mbit down and 3mbit up, the extremely anemic upstream on adsl2+ is kind of a lot crazier imho
chevyowner
join:2013-07-04
Preston, ID

chevyowner to gapmn

Member

to gapmn
quote:
CL would love to upgrade the rural areas. However, the rural areas would not be willing to pay the true cost for the upgrades.
If any company expects their customers to pay for upgrades on their side something is wrong with that company. I can rarely play any online game due to the crappy upload. I would rather have 3/3 then the crap I have now, and I would leave CenturyLink right now if I had another option.
coryw
join:2013-12-22
Flagstaff, AZ

coryw to Atom90

Member

to Atom90
Unless Embarq did things differently, remote DSLAMs are usually environmentally sealed units that are unsuitable and inefficient for installation inside a datacenter or central office. In addition, they're usually connected by T1s or SDSL/SHDSL, which is not how things are connected inside the datacenter.

In Qwest-land, new DSLAMs were definitely bought for remote and rural customers, and installed in new enclosures at cross-connects. At the time, they were fed by T1s, which involved using copper that was already in the ground.

Today, there's not that much that can be done to improve the service without fiber. If CenturyLink switches from T1s to SHDSL today, we'll laugh at them, even though it could stand to improve service a little bit, and make up to about 7/12m service available to those of us who have 1.5 today, just depending on how badly CenturyLink wants to over-sell it. SHDSL is realistically only good for about 90 megs to the DSLAM, and with each DSLAM having 48 ports, you're really just looking at 1.5 megs suffering less congestion, and 3 being iffy.

The problem is both that a new DSLAM needs to be bought, that can realistically cost anywhere from $1000 to $10,000, before you pay the people who come out, unplug the old one and plug the new one in.

Then you need to get the Internet to the new DSLAM, and that involves installing fiber from the DSLAM to central office, because as I mentioned, SHDSL is realistically not going to work. That is typically extremely labor and time intensive, requiring blue-stake to come in and mark all the underground utilities everywhere, and then a backhoe to come in and dig up a path from the DSLAM to a point nearby where a fiber can be had (presuming there's already enough dark fiber, say, to the next DSLAM) and at that point if there's not, they may as well trench from that point to the next one, and so on.

I think a lot of people just think "oh yeah, this is an incremental upgrade." I'm even guilty of it from time to time, because I happen to know where the next nearest fiber-fed DSLAM from mine is, but it often ends up being more complicated from that.

For example, in my situation -- there's a fiber hand-hole in the ground near this other DSLAM and there's a pretty clear path, but that doesn't mean that there's any dark fiber from the CO to that area that can be extended, or that there's an Ethernet switch there to split what fiber is there from that location to others, nor is pulling more fibers necessarily going to be easy, because whatever conduit was installed when the fibered DSLAM was installed might not have any more space in it. (So, CL will need to bury another conduit the entire path from the CO to this DSLAM before they can then extend out to mine.)

So, realistically, $56 is probably not enough to fund a useful upgrade of your local service equipment. Your $56 probably mostly goes to local operations. The part that does go to upgrades may indeed get directed to another part of the overall system, but so's everybody's money. And when it's time to upgrade your DSLAM, the users that are in CL's biggest cities (Seattle/Portland/Vegas/Denver/Phoenix/Tucson/Albuquerque/Minneapolis/Omaha et al) aren't complaining that a small percentage of their monthly fee went to upgrade a DSLAM in a rural area. (Or: they shouldn't be.)

The other other option, I suppose, is that CL keeps everything separated and only DSLAMs that have a lot of subscribers can ever get upgrades because those are the only systems that can generate enough revenue to upgrade themselves using subscriber fees. The Adtran Total Access 5000 can run something like 4000 subscriber lines, and in a really dense area of apartment buildings or condos, a fair number of those are going to be 40/20 or 40/5, and lines with pair bonding.

In fact, CL's privately funded upgrade process starts with a $2000 fee to do a site evaluation. The good news is that if you started that process and had a lot of buy-in from your neighbors, you could probably get them to replace it all with GPON, but if you don't want to directly bear the cost of installing that system, then you'll need to wait like the rest of us.
coryw

coryw to chevyowner

Member

to chevyowner
CenturyLink doesn't expect customers to pay, but there is actually a process for customers to privately fund the investigation into what it would take to improve an area, and then for those customers to actually have the upgrades installed, at whatever the true cost is.

Unfortunately, depending on what you have now and what your specific exact circumstances are, you may not be happy with what CenturyLink can offer you when they upgrade your local area. For example, somebody living within a few thousand wire feet of the DSLAM may be able to get 12/5 all the way on up through 40/20, but you may actually be 12-15,000 wire feet from the DSLAM, at which point you'd only be able to get like 1.5m/896k or 3m/640k anyway. And even if you're connecting to a brand new pair-bondng capable DSLAM, CenturyLink just isn't going to bother with pair bonding at that distance.

One possibility is that it may be possible to use the customer-funded upgrade process to get CenturyLink to install GPON fiber in a neighborhood. That will probably end up costing more because as mentioned n my previous post, fiber needs to be trenched and put in the ground, unless you have fully aerial utilities. The nice thing about GPON is that CL can sell the same speeds five feet from the OLT, and about fifteen to thirty kilometers from the OLT.

Ultimately, even if you don't give CenturyLink a whole bunch of money in one go to upgrade the local area, they have to get money to do it somehow -- either by financing it (and paying back the financing with revenues on sales of the product) or by saving revenues from sales of the product and using that to upgrade when there's enough of it.
chevyowner
join:2013-07-04
Preston, ID

1 edit

chevyowner

Member

There is about 10000 people in the county I live in, about about 5000 in the city, and for some reason CenturyLink completed a (to my knowledge) major upgrade here by running new fiber cables here. It is better then it was before, but it is still bad. I don't even live one mile from the location Qwest installed things here, and because of of that I doubt anyone farther out has a better connection.

Another part of the problem here that all the equipment around town is old. There is a connection box close to the street that has no weather proofing, and anyone could access it with common hand tools. This is not the NID, but the box that has phone lines for 4+ houses near it.

PS
I don't care what they do with the money paid for the connection. To me paying for an upgrade is paying in addition to the existing monthly fee. For example $56 per month + $40 upgrade fee that may be charged for months or years.
bones200
Premium Member
join:2008-07-11
Randleman, NC

bones200 to Stunty

Premium Member

to Stunty
I agree with that statement. Yes there are other companies. But if they are not at your doorstep, you can't count them as choices!
coryw
join:2013-12-22
Flagstaff, AZ

coryw to chevyowner

Member

to chevyowner
That was my misunderstanding.

To my knowledge, there's no "upgrade fees" or anything of that nature -- at least in the manner you described. There is the Internet Cost Recovery Fee in some markets, but that's basically a $1/mo price hike, rather than a $more-but-less-frequently fee.

They will charge an installation fee if you move from a single pair line to a pair bonded installation, but that's because they have to provide a new modem and ensure your home inside wiring is set up for two pairs.

If CL already ran fiber to your DSLAM and you're already on ADSL2+ or VDSL2, then you will likely have what you do for a very long time. There's probably a few more kilobits of upload left in those old lines, but CL seems unwilling to let people have, say, one megabit or two megabits of upload, even if their lines are reasonably capable of it. If you were close enough to get 40M down on a single pair, it would have 5M upload, but if you're at 20m/896k, the only official way to get more upload right now is to go to business class and order 20/2 or 40/2, both of which would be delivered by pair bonding.

After that, unless CL starts allowing over provision on upload, or adds 1m/2m upload tiers, you'll basically have to wait until they put in another cross-connect box and a DSLAM closer to your house (a mile is a whole long way on copper, and it looks like about 20M is what you'll get at that distance, but on either ADSL2+ or VDSL2, you're unlikely to get a whole lot more upload, which is definitely unfortunate) or they put in fiber.

Another thing to try is looking at your home network. When I go to play online games, I usually end up turning off wifi on a few devices or doing other things to reduce the overall amount of traffic. 896k of upload is fine for games, except when 10+ devices on your home network are trying to check your e-mail and/or receive chat messages.

Also, those distribution pedestals are rarely very well protected. I think CenturyLink (and really, all the phone companies in the United States) are just counting on the fact that most people simply do not notice their presence. In Verizon territory, they frequently let the peds go without covers at all, and if the cover disappeared from yours and you reported it to CL, they'd eventually put in a new ped to replace it, which is good.