I am in an area that is pretty remote. I am about 25 miles from the
central office for my little telephone company. SouthWest Texas
Telephone http://www.swtexas.net I am also 25 miles from
the nearest restaurant, bank, and gas station. And I am 12 miles
from my mailing address town which claims a population of 20
people. There is one building in town--shared by a miniature (1/2 day)
post office and a LAWYER!
>Southwest Texas Telephone Company serves 3,493 access lines
>in 3,675 square miles with 3,716 miles of facilities, a density of .95
>access lines per square mile. The company provides a state-of-the-art
>telephone network featuring digital switching, fiberoptic transmission
>facilities, equal access to long distance providers, and the latest in
>enhanced calling features.
With only 38 employees they cover a BIG area with less than one
access line per square mile--and that includes the towns. Out
here where I am it is probably between 1/4 and 1/10 of that density.
They have a T1 line to the Lost Maples State Natural Area which
is a small park and campground about 8 miles away. And they
ran DSL an extra 8 miles for TWO of us. Using some sort of
pedestal-mounted repeaters every three miles or so. I have
384K down and 256K up speed and it is extremely reliable.
Tests from south-central Texas to west-coast test sites show
actual 320K down and 210K up with the addition of the 1000+
mile ping distance. The "down" times seem to be when my DSL
modem doesn't reset after a short power outage due to lightning.
Moving the modem's power to the correct side of the UPS fixed that.
The technology is there to greatly extend DSL--it is being held up
by the accountants with the big phone companies. Our phone
company is so small that they probably can't AFFORD accountants
so they don't know any better!
Seriously--the economics can't be too bad if they can run an extra
8 miles of DSL in order to add just two of us and make any ROI.
The people out here who CANNOT get DSL are the ones whose
homes are more than three miles from the road! Guess they
can't put these repeaters on the individual pairs.
BTW The distance this works seems to be modem dependent.
The first couple of modems did not work and they switched brands
and now the ZyXEL modem works perfectly.
73--John W0UN
At 03:59 PM 4/17/2004, you wrote:
Has Verizon figured out how to extend the range limitation on DSL? I
thought it used to be limited to X miles from a central office.
I don't believe so. At least SBC hasn't figured out how to do it as
yet. I live on the eastern side of Urbana, IL - quite a distance from the
central office - and no luck on DSL availablility.
This is a bit frustrating as the University of Illinois, located here in
Urbana, is a historical and current hotbed of IT research and design.
Heck, the U of I was the birthplace of Mosaic, the basic DNA of all web
browsers, and many of us here can't even get DSL! Our only option for
boadband is cable and wireless.
---
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