>Considering most low-end DSL is 128K up, 1Mb down, they are claiming 1Mb >up, 10Mb download? absurd.
Although I agree with you that anyone that says their service is 10 times faster then DSL is likely lying (or deliberatly misleading), I do have to say that Verizon is offering a new Fiber based service. They only *just* rolled it out and it is currently available in very VERY few places (but growing). Their new service can give you these kinds of speeds. Their packages are 5 down 2 up for $40, 15 down 2 up for $50 and 30 down 5 up for $200. And I know some DSL providers are offering a 6 Mb download, 1.5 Mb upload. That still isn't 10 times faster then DSL, but close to it (Speakeasy offers that speed choice). The way these companies get away with claims like that is, they compare to the slowest "normal" DSL (usually 192k up and down, as that is the slowest form of SDSL, although IDSL is only 144k each way), and then they go against their fastest theoritical speed, which is of course a speed that no one can ever actually get (for DSL that is the speed for less then 1000 feet from the CO, which most CO's exceed 1000 feet just getting the wire out of the building... or for cable, that is the speed within one hop from the main office, and on a totally virgin line with no other users connected at the same time... ie: in either case, no one will ever really get those speeds). Also, people should be careful that speed claims don't entail some kind of compression on the data to "mimic" a speed. NetZero does that with their "web accellerator" dialup service. They compress the data before sending it, and their dialup client decompresses it on the other end. This gives it the appearance of being 15-50% faster. The problem with this method is A: you need a fast computer to do this on the fly, and B: it only applies to things that are easily compressed and compress well (in other words, any pre-compressed data it won't effect, and one of the most common forms of that to run into... the GIFs and JPEGs that are all over the web... they won't compress any further, so you get no speed gains on the very same items that take so long to load in the first place!) -chris <http://www.mythtech.net> ___________________________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe send a mail message with a SUBJECT line of "unsubscribe" to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> or <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
