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Comment by bluedino | Hacker News Reader

I live across the street from the main AT&T office in my town and I can't get > 1.5mb

My parents have been capped at 1.5 mbps (in practice closer to 768 mbps) since around 2003, and they're about 1/3 to 1/2 a mile away from the closest box. Over the years I've made multiple requests that resulted in improved line quality (change in PoP wiring, removed some home outlets with corroded contacts, remove bridge taps on the lines) but Ameritech-SBC-AT&T have never offered a better speed. They abandoned DSL in favor of U-Verse which, for rural locations, is of absolutely no use since they're never going to run fiber out to those semi-remote and remote DSLAMs. I wish something like G.fast would be useful in the US but the locations for which the distance isn't an issue are generally locations which have already been better served for a decade or longer by another technology than copper (cable, FTTH, FTTN, even Wireless in some cases).

If your parents are 1/3 to 1/2 of a mile away from the closest box with those speeds, then it's likely the 'box' is a crossbox (wiring junction) instead of a DSLAM (networking card). Where the DSLAM is that is feeding that crossbox... well that could be much further.

If the loop length is .34-.5 miles (which is quite good) with no impedance mismatch or bridge taps or other various copper faults, then you would/should be able to sustain 10+ Mbps on an ADSL2+ connection.

My guess is that the distance is further than it seems, and the line may not have been reconditioned from phone to internet purposes.

Anyway I bring it up because distance is the biggest determinant of bandwidth when it comes to copper, and if the distance is great then there is little that fixing copper faults can do to improve internet speeds at your parents' place.

I'm sure you're aware, but ADSL2+ is only offered by ATT in their U-Verse portfolio. ADSL1 would be faster at that distance too.

It should be a DSLAM (by now) as it was a regular junction that was replaced and added to with one of the larger white DSLAM boxes. I could be mistaken though, so that's a fair thing to point out.

If there is a DSLAM right next to the crossbox, then these are the two possibilities:

[1] (Common and very likely) The DSLAM they installed there is a fiber node and feeds only VDSL over < 50 ft wire to the crossbox. ADSL also feeds into the crossbox, but not from the new DSLAM. It still travels from the CO (central office) and may still be 1-2 miles of wire away.

[2] (Uncommon and less likely) The DSLAM has VDSL and ADSL cards in it. In this situation the DSLAM can support high speed VDSL to very close residents and ADSL to further residents. The CO is no longer the source of ADSL signal, and this is typically a nice reduction in loop length for people.

In your shoes, I'd get in touch with the ISP and see if you're CO fed or not. If you're CO fed, there's little that can be done to improve the speeds =(. You could ask if it's possible to do pair bonding to improve your speeds. Just beware, switching to pair bonding means you'd need to lease/purchase a new modem that can do bonding and the ISP would have to roll a truck to wire up the 2nd pair.

Hope that helps!

I had a friend who worked for an ISP in Montreal, and he showed me the map of coverage of the island, colour-coded by which exchange served that area.

There were a lot of rectangles and squares, but there were also some weird shapes, strange cutouts, or long stretches. I think there were even some islands of coverage A surrounded by coverage B.

You can be fifteen feet from the CO, but that doesn't mean that's the one they ran your lines from.

Same. And on top of that, I keep hearing horrible stories from the world of cable business, and I shudder to make a switch with more $$

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