Broadband access here in my neighborhood has been something of a pain in the rear. Strangely, I think it’s because my neighborhood was ahead of it’s time.
Let me explain.
My neighborhood was wired in 1983 when it was built, with new-fangled fiber optics for telephone service. When I moved here in 1998, I tried to get DSL, and was disappointed to find out that it wasn’t available — ironically, because of the fiber optics. You see, DSL is a technology that was designed to leverage the ancient copper wiring of the POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) system. DSL signals don’t travel over fiber optics.
My neighborhood’s modern infrastructure is what kept it from moving into the broadband era.
Eventually, the cable company came in, dug up all the lines, and installed fiber for cable television. Soon thereafter, we finally got broadband, in the form of the cable modem. Which brings us to today.
The biggest drawback of the cable modem is its severely slanted ratio between uploads and downloads. Generally speaking, I get a pretty good download speed; it’s the upload speed that’s the problem. It is incredibly slow, and since I use voice over IP telephony, it sometimes is completely saturated.
Well, cross you fingers, because the end to that bottleneck may have finally come.
Jann, who hosts my web kingdom of many sites, is getting a new high speed connection for my server. We discussed my problem, and after several non-starters (for instance, a copper connection directly between my house in Arlington and his in San Francisco), we discovered that his broadband company could hook me up!
So, by this time next month, I should have a new copper wire coming to the house with 6 times more downstream and 3 times more upstream bandwidth. It’s the upstream that’s important — it means that I’ll be able to do the higher bandwidth streaming radio and video services I keep thinking about. Mostly to amuse myself, but also to entertain my loyal visitors (who currently can only listen to my radio stations 1 or 2 at a time).
I’m starting to formulate all kinds of fun ideas for that big old G5 that’s barely ticking over serving files. Just you wait.
