A Gift from Verizon
VERIZON is my wired (also wireless and DSL) phone company. People seem to love to hate The Phone Company but I am in LOVE with Verizon, for a serious yet semi-silly reason. A couple of weeks ago I realized Verizon now offers a new DSL plan that delivers 3 Megabits per second downstream. I called their 800 number, and had a friendly interaction with (gasp!) someone who knew what they wer etalking about. They did attempt to switch me from DISH Networks to Direct TV, but the numbers don’t make sense in my situation. About a week later I received an email telling me the DSL bandwidth change to 3Mbps had been made.
My downloads here at The Ranch are now much zippier. In some cases my $29.95/month DSL delivered in a semi-rural area is performing better than at my Day Job where we have two dedicated T1 lines.
That’s not all. My new DSL plan also allows upload speeds of 768Kbps. Can you spell “home server?” I’ll do that as soon as some geeky friends tell me how to keep it secure.
For a residential user, how fast is fast enough? My answer is “It depends.” For e-mail and web surfng and downloading updates to Windows and new software, my experince say 3Mbps is great. For most email and some surfing, I’m sure 3Mbps is effectively no faster than 1.5Mbps was, because performance bottlenecks are elsewhere, generally a slow server.
If that’s true, why am I excited by ADSL2+ and VDSL2 ? Phone companies in the USA are starting to compete with cable operators and direct broadcast satellite, e.g. DISH and DirectTV.
Yes, my 3Mbps DSL service is great, but in the near future I expect to need bandwidth in the ADSL2+ or VDSL2 or even higher rates FIBER delivers.. More on that topic later. Until then, my gift of 3Mbps DSL service at the same price per month as my previous 1.5Mbps service is great. Thank you Verizon. You be da man!.