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Haven't got a clue about broadband terminology? Jumping in the deep end in your quest for a service provider? You can be perfectly proficient at sending an email and organising your digital photos but when it comes to choosing an Internet Service Provider (ISP), well, you’ll find there are a fair few of them… and a lot of jargon to get familiar with too. Think of this as a beginner’s guide to Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Lines – commonly known as ADSL.
A little technical talk
If you've been doing your homework in order to find an ISP, no doubt the phrase ADSL will have popped up more than once. An Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line enables faster transmission of data than your regular telephone lines and voice modem can provide. One of the reasons it is popular for home use, compared to other forms of digital subscriber lines (DSL), is that ADSL allows home users to quickly download much more information than they are able to upload - perfect for your average surfer. ADSL signals cannot travel far, and so they're stripped down when they reach the office of your ISP and routed into a conventional Internet network. For this reason, at home or office, you only need the one line for both Internet access as well as phone calls.
Why choose ADSL?
There are two good reasons to get ADSL – speed and convenience. With ADSL someone can be on the net while another family member uses the phone. With an ADSL service the bad old days of family feuds and righteous web surfers furious at interruptions will be long gone. Add to that the fact that ADSL is “always on” – in other words, there's no need to configure or operate a modem. The busy screechings of the dial-up modem will be a distant memory and the hardware itself is rapidly becoming a museum-piece.
Convenience aside, when it comes to new technology the buzz word is “speed”. So perhaps the main reason ADSL has become the standard is just that – speed. Downloading and surfing are done at a fraction of the rate of using a dial-up modem or Integrated Signal Digital Network (ISDN) connection. Starting at the bottom, you can choose from 256kb/64kb (a peak download speed of 256 kilobits per second and a peak upload speed of 64 kilobits per second), right up to 512kb/512kb. (An upload is any information you send back). Given that dial-up modems generally run at around 45kb per second, there's quite a difference between them.
But wait! There’s more… speed, convenience and one last advantage: with no dialling, there's a fixed online cost. If you generally keep the purse strings super tight and barely use the Internet you might not want to pay a set rate for a monthly plan – but for most people, having the fixed monthly cost is to their advantage. The monthly plan cost is higher than dial-up but you get a lot of download for your dollars and don’t have to pay each time you connect.
All roses? Well, not quite. There are, of course, one or two disadvantages with ADSL. Firstly, it isn't available everywhere, partly because it works better the closer you are to the provider’s exchange. This also means that as the signal can't travel long distances, rural customers can miss out. In addition, the quoted speeds are maximums. Let’s put that into capitals: MAXIMUMS. This means that your service may not run as fast as you're told – you may be “sharing” the speed and it may also be considerably slower at certain times of the day when the network experiences congestion.
The upshot? If you live in the city and download more than you upload (like the vast majority of home users) then you should probably have a good hard think about getting an ADSL service.
