[tablespoon]

> And here's a followup project by investigative journalists at The Markup:

> https://themarkup.org/still-loading/2022/10/19/dollars-to-me...

That article is pretty bad. It doesn't once mention DSL or that technology's inherent technical limitations that can result in widely variable speeds (IIRC, your bandwidth is determined by the length of the wire between your house and the central telephone office). Then it spends a lot of time talking about race, which is likely creating a misleading impression that lends itself to outrage.

[tguvot]

DSL bandwidth is determined by the length of the wire between DSL modem and DSLAM which can be in the cabinet on the curb (and I believe it usually is).

Also it depends on what version of DSL standard we are talking. I personally started with adsl2 which was 12/3, upgraded eventually to VDSL2 which did 150/10 and latest standard is G.Fast which can give 1 Gbit/s aggregate uplink and downlink at 100m

[kevin_thibedeau]

It also depends on the condition of the wire. 50 year old paper insulated POTS wiring will struggle for just a few Mbps even if it's a short hop to the CO. Thank god the telcos were able to collect the USF surcharge to pay for the necessary upgrades.

[tguvot]

good point. interesting if there are any estimations "out there" about age of POTS wiring.

[Retric]

The odds of having a cable under 100m to a DSLAM basically rounds to 0.

At an highly optimistic 1 mile you’re already down to 20Mbps and most people are significantly further than that. Remember it’s the physical distance of the cable between the actual devices that matters and that’s not straight.

[tguvot]

depends on location. and on greed of the telco. i used to live within 100m of dslam. in cities with dense construction/etc it's achievable. also, with g.fast it's 1000 aggregated at 100m. for longer distances numbers are 200 m 600mbit, 300m-300mbit, 500m - 100mbit. numbers are not too bad even for suburb. For comparison, high speed mm wave 5g needs to be deployed any 100-200m in order to get proper speed/penetration.

admittedly, even g.gast it's not as good/scalable as DOCSIS or Fiber, but it could be used and deployed "back in a day" as perfectly good solution. and even today it's not that bad for majority of population, if properly deployed

as anecdote , i saw like 20 years ago privately deployed/managed DSL systems in kibbuz. wonder what they have now

[Retric]

Again you can’t directly compare distances between 5G and DSL because the wire isn’t taking the shortest path through 3D space between teleco equipment and your modem.

Also a single 600-700MHz 5G tower can cover hundreds of square miles with 5G service with up to 250 megabits per second. 2.5-3.5GHz can still hit several miles with up to 900 megabits per second, and 24-39GHz towers can cover a mile radius at up to 3Gbps. Real world performance depends on many many factors, but DSL performance can be similarly degraded from it’s theoretical maximum.

[tguvot]

i compared with mm wave 5g because it requires same density of deployment as DSLAMs for proper performance, if not higher.

> Real world performance depends on many many factors,

like how many UEs are sharing spectrum. Which is usually a lot

> but DSL performance can be similarly degraded from it’s theoretical maximum.

totally.

[mint2]

dsl can get that fast…?! Why is even today the current best offering in many mountain communities in CA is 5/1 ?

and why is 5/1 also the only AT&T offering in pockets of high tech Irvine CA?

[tguvot]

because at&t doesn't feel like upgrading equipment. too much effort. in general they made a strategic decision to invest mainly in wireless. you can also throw into mix words like "absence of government regulation" and "regional monopoly".

[FireBeyond]

On multiple areas, AT&T (I believe) successfully petitioned the FCC to not count a bunch of low end DSL and similar services, on the basis that they were "obsolete" and lowering averages.

To be clear, they were still actively selling those services, and in some cases, it was the only option, but they just didn't want them to count.