ADSL - the way the internet should be

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No – it's ADSL!

I'm hopelessly technophile. Give it a set of initials and I'll give it a go. I'd heard the rumours of downloads faster than a speeding bullet. I'd read the releases. Suddenly, it was time…

I'd paid my dues. Over the years I climbed the ladder of modems, from 14.4 kilobits per second to 28.8, a pause at 36.6, then onwards and upwards to 56Kbps: officially, modem nirvana; but actually a bit of a fraud given current technical constraints.

It never seemed to make much difference. Increased data volumes neatly cancelled out increased modem speed.

America has cable, but we've missed that wave – men with shovels digging up the road in 2000? I don't think so. Britain largely missed it too, and in a wild lunge towards what it vainly hoped was the cutting edge, decided to use mains electricity instead.

The Digital Power Line system piggybacks about a megabit per second of data atop mains power – with great difficulty. Last month, Britain's United Utilities folded its DPL initiative and crept away, because in America ADSL was doing the same thing with phone-lines at nearly 10Mbps

And now – way ahead of Australia - it's doing it here too, thanks to Telecom's JetStream.

To get the dull stuff out of the way, DSL stands for Digital Subscriber Line and comes in two principal flavours: SDSL, the symmetric version, which allows voice and data to race simultaneously along a copper phone-line at up to 3Mbps both ways; and ADSL, the asymmetric version chosen by Telecom, which supports downloads up to 9Mbps but uploads at only about 640Kbps.

Visit www.adsl.com if you really want to get into the technology.

To try it out yourself – and you definitely should – you must first go over to www.telecom.co.nz/jetstream and check that you're in the right part of town, i.e. within 3 kilometres of a DSL-enabled exchange. There are 24 in Auckland so far [of a planned New Zealand total of 450, with 49 already completed] and Telecom is provisioning more at the rate of 5 a month.

If so, you can sign up there and then, first promising to pay Telecom's bill in timely fashion - I mention this because JetStream isn't the cheapest option around, in the sense that a Ferrari is going to set you back more than an Escort.

You'll be paying either $89 [incl. GST and Xtra's monthly fee], $219 or $369 per month depending on the data thresholds you choose [600, 1500 or 3000Mb]; for Xtra became hooked on data-charging from its earliest years and, like so many addicts, still finds itself unable to kick the pernicious habit.

On top of that, there's a one-off connection fee to Xtra itself [$39.95], a $300 JetStream installation charge and $50 for an Ethernet card, plus buy [$450] or rent [$30 per month] options for the JetStream modem. It all adds up.

You can also sign up for ADSL with Paradise (www.paradise.net.nz), ComNet (www.comnet.co.nz), WorldNet (www.world.net.nz/tls/default.htm), Iconz (www.iconz.co.nz), or other providers to be announced next week.

Your line will be checked and, if necessary, given a tweak or two. A guy will arrive and do purposeful but mysterious things to your telephone and cast geekish spells on your computer. Then he will vanish, if not in a puff of smoke then before you really had time to find out his name, leaving you alone in an eerie hush - no squawking modem, as Dave Barry put it, like a duck choking on a kazoo - for your first ADSL surfing experience.

It's everything you heard: not surfing so much as riding a tidal wave, a tsunami, of data. Freed from the tyranny of the modem, you are permanently engrafted to the internet and accessing it is just as fast as doing anything else on your computer. And you can still use the phone.

A Norton antivirus update is measured in seconds; updating Windows itself becomes almost recreational – I mean, at this speed, why not download all three flavours of Chinese? A 65Mb download of Sierra's Homeworld demo (www.sierrastudios.com/games/homeworld/noflash/c-support.html) didn't take much longer than a shower and a shave. It is, as Telecom truthfully points out, "the internet the way it's supposed to be".

To see how fast your transfers are going since you no longer have a dial-up window, you'll need HagelTech's DU Meter 2.2, a cute graphical window about half the size of a credit card.

DSL offers enough power to turn any computer into a server, and Windows 2000 will make this a tempting option for many. Telecom is addressing the issue of static IP addresses and promises an announcement very soon, which will certainly stimulate the market. Nor is the technology standing still – Lucent (www.lucent.com) recently released a DSL product which offers 16 high-quality voice and data-transmissions on a single copper line.

Caveats? After JetStreaming for a month, I don't have any, other than price.

Advisory: if you can afford it, get it.



BOOKMARKS

Most Competitive:FairMarket

Microsoft, Excite, Dell, Lycos… it's eBay (www.ebay.com) versus the rest. Desperately resisting an eBay chokehold on the rich online auction market, over 100 players [but not Amazon] have cobbled all their separate databases into a single auction network.

Advisory: rather less than the sum of its parts…

www.fairmarket.com