[Info-vax] US Broadband

[JF Mezei]

On 15-03-02 13:42, Kerry Main wrote:

> In Ottawa, I have 25 Mbs down and 10 Mbs up via Bell.

Consider yourself lucky. I am in an area certified for 25mbps. The
building even has a sign from Bell that it was certified for 25mbps. But
can barely get 1mbps up (in fact, downgraded my package back to ADSL2
and now get only 880kbps up, when with ADSL1 on the further DSLAM, it
was capable of 1.3mbps up).

Ottawa is lucky that its VDSL deployment was delayed and by the time it
happened, Bell had runned out of its "liquidation sale" stocks of
ancient pre-VDSL2 compliant Stinger DSLAMs. (When Alcatel bought Lucent,
the first product line they canned is the Stinger which had never worked
properly or been popular).

I am stuck on stingers, unless I can convicne Bell to put me back on the
7330 on at the CO across the block from where the remote DSLAM is.


150mbps is only for areas with FTTH. Essentially areas where Bell is
losing so many customers to cable that Bell is investing to try to keep
customers.  And yes, Bell si deploying FTTH (or FTTP to be politically
correct) in many areas where VDSL2 wasn't deployted yet. VDSL2 areas
will be last to get FTTH, except for Stinger-only areas which don't
perform).

Note that initial VDSL2 deployments not only had the dreaded
malfunctioning Stingers, but distances standards were set to 1km,
whereas the firmware patch to sort-of enable VDSL2 on Stingers only
works to 400m. (stingers require special modems, will not work with
normal VDSL2 modems).