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May 31, 1999

The Broadband Connection

By Jason Levitt

s of last week, the last component in my broadband triumvirate was activated. Terrestrially speaking, I'm completely wired. My fully stoked "last mile" has ISDN, cable modem, and most recently, SDSL (Symmetric Digital Subscriber Line), running side-by-side. All three are nailed-up, persistent connections that hum along around-the-clock and provide me with varying degrees of back-end service at different price points (see Table 1 below).

Table 1: My Broadband SOHO Services (Austin, Texas)
	CPE (Customer Premise Equipment)	Service Providers	Basic Features	Basic cost (bandwidth plus IP addresses)
ISDN (installed 11/94)	Ascend Pipeline 75 Router	Physical --Southwestern Bell ISP --Real/Time Communications	2B channels bonded, 128-Kbps connection, using Point-to-Point Protocol. Sixteen static IP addresses.	$350 per month
Cable (installed 10/98)	Motorola CyberSUFR Modem	Physical --Time Warner ISP--Time Warner	1.5 Mbps downstream, 768 Mbps upstream. One dynamic IP address via DHCP.	$45 per month
SDSL (installed 5/99)	Netopia R7100Router/Hub	Physical --Southwestern Bell ISP --Jump Point Communications	784-Kbps symmetric connection using frame relay. Sixteen static IP addresses	$269.95 per month

The Difference
The simple question remains: Does the extra bandwidth make a difference? The answer is yes, but perhaps not as much as one would think. The theoretical speed difference between my ISDN connection (128 Kbps) and my cable modem and SDSL connections (both 768 Kbps) is large, and I can already hear the marketing blurbs claiming "six times the speed" of ISDN or "10 times the speed of a 56-Kbps modem." But the difference I find in reality can vary considerably. In the best case, during the middle of the night when downloading a large file, the cable modem and SDSL are almost six times faster than the ISDN line (see Table 2 below).

Table 2: Sample Download Time (Tuesday, 1 a.m. CST)
	Download of ftp://ftp.netscape.com/pub/powerpack/pp2016b2.exe (5,882 Kbytes)
ISDN	366 seconds
Cable	62 seconds
SDSL	66 seconds

But for casual Web browsing, the difference is maybe two or three times, which can translate into only a few seconds, in many cases. The overhead of my virtual private network over the public Internet is another case where the throughput is closer to only a three times difference. Traffic and routing over the Internet are largely responsible for the slowdowns. A general idea of how the routing and traffic of the public Internet can affect throughput is seen in the ping times in Table 3.

Table 3: Sample Ping Times (Tuesday, 2 p.m. CST)
	ISDN	Cable	SDSL
CMP Internal Web site (VPN)	150ms	60ms	60ms
www.netscape.com	145ms	62ms	53ms
www.ibm.com	198ms	62ms	86ms
www.amazon.com	185ms	78ms	80ms
www.messe.de	285ms	140ms	151ms

Cable vs. ISDN vs. SDSL
It's no secret that I'm not particularly happy with Time Warner's thoroughly consumer approach to broadband connectivity. Time Warner's "Roadrunner" cable-modem service uses dynamically assigned IP addresses and a clunky system of user identification that makes it difficult to use the cable modem for anything other than simple client Internet connectivity. Unofficially, the service is unmetered, even though the user agreement says Time Warner can disconnect, or throttle back, your service for any "inappropriate" usage. On the positive side, the price can't be beat, and I like the fact that the physical connection and the ISP service are provided by the same company.

I've had my dual ISDN service for nearly five years, and it has served me well, though I went through three ISPs that had lousy back-end connectivity before finding one that could give me close to the kind of throughput that I was paying for. Good service doesn't come cheap, though. My ISDN connectivity is expensive, though I'm getting mail forwarding and 16 static IP addresses for the money. It's definitely business-class service. The connection has gone down only three times in the last two years, and it usually was a problem in the physical connection--not the ISP. On the positive side, in Texas, there are no line charges for ISDN except for those that might be imposed by the ISP. My ISP does not meter the service, but at 128 Kbps, I'm not likely to overload any circuits.

SDSL is my latest score. In Austin, there are two providers. Southwestern Bell sells ADSL and ISPs such as Jump Point Communications resell Northpoint's SDSL service.

SDSL is not cheap, but so far, it appears fast and solid. Jump Point sells metered service (5 Gbytes per month) at a reasonable $249.95 per month for 784-Kbps symmetric service. For $20 extra per month, I get 16 static IP addresses. The unmetered service is nearly three times as expensive ($795 per month). With static IPs and fast, symmetric bandwidth, this is definitely business-class service and is much more suitable for business use than the Time Warner cable modem.

Waiting For Solutions
I'm fully wired terrestrially, but there is still the ether. Wireless technologies are getting better all the time and RF, satellite, and microwave options are all coming down in price and increasing in reliability. But what all of these broadband services are waiting for, both wireless and terrestrial, are value-added services that can best make use of the extra bandwidth. I discuss some of these services in my April 26, 1999, DSL article. As these services emerge, I hope to offer some competitive tests on my broadband connections.

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