ExtremeLabs, Inc

When I moved to Bloomington Indiana, the residence had AT&T DSL. It was about $143 for what the telcos call “triple play” which means cable TV+Internet+landline phone. The DSL was plainly awful, even after upgrade. Largely, DNS was unresponsive and pages had to be loaded multiple times, it seemed. DNS cache was also churned to quickly making DNS hits for page loads untenable: SLOW.

The cable TV portion wasn’t much better. Selections were few; DVR selections plainly stank. The landline was a landline; hard to screw that up as the technology is about 100+ years old, even if it does sit on top of the DSL circuitry. Bah.

Comcast was $43 cheaper. More TV channels. Phone was good. The Internet quality was good, but not as good as we’ve seen Comcast do in other places. We put Comcast into our office. It plainly stinks. It had ping times that can be measured in decades. Three techs have come out to try to get it to work, and a fourth is scheduled soon. In the meantime, downloads are like a roller coaster, and Skype seems to be especially bad. No, it’s plainly awful.

Yes, the price is less, but we’re still not satisfied with Comcast. Perhaps that’ll change.

So what is it, this broadband stuff?

Once upon a time there was baseband and broadband. They were electrical characteristics of network data transmission. Now, the term is whatever anyone wants to make it.

My sense of broadband is something faster than a megabit per second in data transmission payload. This means that a lot of connectivity posing as broadband today is actually just slow data. This means you, DSL, UMTS, EV-DO, 1xRTT, and all forms of ISDN. It also likely means that the venerable T1 is slower in payload than what should be minimum broadband speed.

But marketing twits across the planet will disagree. Fancy that.