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DSL's Top Speed

Is there a top speed for DSL? Members of the ISP-Broadband list discuss.

On the ISP-Broadband list in October, PP wondered,

"Had a customer tell me yesterday that someone had offered him an 8MBps feed with DSL. He wanted to know what our top speeds were and I didn't have an answer for him. Does anybody know what the maximum bandwidth is that can be provided to a single user with DSL?"

A number of respondents noted that, hypothetically at least, 8MBps should be possible:

[CM observed] "The theoretical limit of DSL is 8.448 megabits per second. But to get anywhere near these speeds, you'd practically have to be in the same room as the DSLAM. I would certainly be wary of someone offering 8MBps feeds, unless you share the same office!"

[SI added] "I'm 1033 feet from the CO, and I get 2MBps or so regularly. But the engineers do claim that 8MBps is possible when the wind is right, and the earth's magnetic field is just so, and the gods accept my burnt offerings…" Others suggested the limit is potentially far higher:

[BS explained] "If you're willing to do Multilink PPP, Netopia now has equipment that will bond 2 SDSL lines or 4 ISDL lines; Fatpipe has a fancy bridge that run three DSL or T1 lines as one; and there are a couple of software pages that will allow you to share just about as many connections as you can stuff NICs into your desktop. And you can take that quite a bit further. Netopia's DSL DSUs allow one to run a DSL circuit into a T1 WAN card. Thus for those who want to spend some money, on high end routers the sky is literally the limit."

[JD enthused] "You probably won't believe the following. HDTV broadband transmission evidently requires from 19 to about 35-40 MBps, and I've been assured that DSL can handle the bandwidth to deliver HDTV. I suggest you look at the contracts required by free DSL providers, including an exclusive right to sell the customer TV programming. Unlike the free dialup access providers, these free DSL guys know what the pipeline handles and what's coming down. So it's net access and ads now; 500-1000 channels for $20-40/month later. If they can hold out as DSL, cable modems, and TV set top boxes more fully converge, free DSL providers could be sitting pretty in three or four years."

—End

Related articles:
	[Jul. 13, 2000]	Aggregate and Expand DSL
	[Jul. 6, 2000]	Shotgun DSL