As I See It...

by James E. Felton

November 3, 1999

About three weeks ago (October 9th) I called my local phone carrier, Southwestern Bell, to see when their high-speed (DSL) service would be available in our area.  I was more than a little bit shocked when the girl I was speaking to said it was available NOW, and asked me if I wanted to talk to someone about it.  I said sure!  She immediately switched me over to the SW Bell "new products division", and the guy I spoke to scheduled me for an installation on October 27.  He asked what operating system I used and I said Linux.  I was surprised that he didn't say they couldn't do Linux.  All he said was that I needed to have a licensed copy of the OS available at the time of the installation.  I did not mention that I would write about the service, and did not ask for any kind of preferential treatment.  After reading numerous "horror stories" on the net, I wanted to see what the typical customer could expect.  And I wanted to go one step further by getting them to install my DSL for Linux.

The following day, the whole front page of the business section of our state-wide newspaper, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was dedicated to information about DSL service in the Little Rock metropolitan area.  Am I lucky, or what?  I got my order in a day before the crowd!

The article in the paper provided a lot of information about the service, and included a large map of the city with circles indicating the service areas where DSL service was available.  According to the article, there are two-tiers of service available, 1 Mbps, and 6 Mbps.  I thought, no, that can't be right.  6 Mbps?  The guy who scheduled my install didn't mention 6 Mbps service.  I got on the computer and went to the SW Bell website, and sure enough, they are providing 6 Mbps service.  The 6 Mbps service is a little bit pricy, but at least it is available.  They also offer another package which I didn't see in the article, or the general information on the website, called enhanced service.  The enhanced service allows you to hook up DSL to a LAN if you have more than one PC.

Over the next couple of weeks I continued to see articles on the net about problems people had with scheduling, and getting their DSL service installed.  On October 26, the day before my scheduled installation, I decided to call SW Bell to make sure the schedule hadn't changed.  The guy I spoke to said no, the installation should still be on the 27th.  I told him to please make a note of my mobile phone number just in case I wasn't home when they came.

Twenty minutes later my mobile phone rang.  I didn't recognize the number on the caller ID, but I answered it anyway.  The guy on the phone asked if I was James Felton.  I said yes.  Then he said, "this is Earnie with Southwestern Bell.  I'm at your house." I was SHOCKED!  A day early!  I told Earnie that I would be home in 5 minutes.

When I got home the SW Bell truck was in my driveway, but Earnie was nowhere in sight.  I walked around to the back of the house, and there he was, working on the phone panel on the back of my house.  He made a couple of calls to the local office with his mobile phone, and installed a splitter (actually, a filter) on my line.  Then he asked if he could look under the house to verify the phone line routing.  He said that the line to the computer needed to come straight from the box without any branch lines off of it.  Fortunately, that is exactly how my line is installed.  All my extensions split off of another wire from the box.  After verifying the wiring he said we were ready to go inside.

He went to his truck and grabbed two boxes.  One contained an Alcatel 1000 ADSL modem.  The other contained a Kingston KNE 30-T network card.  He brought the boxes in and I turned off my PC while he unpacked them.  I took the cover off my PC and plugged the network card in, and booted up the computer.  Earnie plugged my phone line into the DSL modem, and plugged a CAT-5 cable into the modem and the network card.

Well, I run an older version of Linux, Caldera 1.3, and it refused to recognize the card.  I couldn't make him wait for me to install another version of Linux so I booted up Windows.  Well, Windows recognized the "plug and play" card and asked for the software disk.  I put in the floppy and it installed the drivers.  Then I rebooted the computer, and followed Earnie's instructions to set up the properties in the network section of the Windows Control Panel.  Then, I rebooted again.  I opened up a brower, and it instantly went to my default homepage!  Wow!  It was quick!  Earnie picked up the boxes, and a few tools he brought in and headed for the door.  The whole installation had taken less than an hour!

My first order of business was to check out my download speed.  The first site that came to mind that has files large enough to verify my download speed was sightsound.com which I am evaluating for another article.  I chose a reasonably large file to download, 111 megabytes, and clicked to download it.  The speed indicator in the download window started to climb - 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 - it finally settled at 86.6 kilobytes per second which is equal to 692,800 bits per second, or about 5 megabytes per minute.

Well, I'm not getting 1 megabit per second, but considering the fact that the practical limit for DSL service is three (wire) miles, and I'm about 2 miles from the switch, thats not too bad!  I've downloaded quite a few large files since the service was installed and the speed has been constant.  Actually, a couple of downloads have been slower, but when I canceled them and switched to something else I found that it was the server, not the DSL that was slow.

Have an opinion you'd like to share? Send it to me!

Back to NC News