ADSL and its alternatives?

[Tim Potter]

Paul Lawton writes:

> Guys and Gals,
> 
> A good friend of mine is considering getting ADSL connected to
> his home. He is weighing up the cost of this against the cost
> (dollars and waiting time) of a second telephone line.
> 
> What are the benefits of ADSL? What are its drawbacks? Is IDSN
> an option?

I've had ADSL for about three months now and it's pretty nifty.
I'm on the "unlimited" 3GB/month plan at 512kbits/sec which costs
about $95/month or $80/month if you have telstra preselected for
your voice phone.  I pretty much only use it during the day and a
little in the evenings for email/surfing/ssh/cvs and it regularly
gets 52KB/sec or so to the US and to big sites in Australia.
It's been pretty reliable in Canberra, although there were quite
a few outages in Melbourne which have resulted in Telstra not
charging for last months access and 1/2 price for this month.

Drawbacks, well ADSL to ADSL and uploading data in general seems
to peak at a couple of KB/sec which is pretty awful.  Oh yeah and
the news server wasn't working for a while there.  (-:

ISDN is still heinously expensive and not much faster than a 56k
modem.  Having to dial in all the time is pretty stupid and being
able to receive voice calls while on the internet without having
a second phone line is good as well.

> Can anyone help? I am reluctant to believe the Telstra/Transact
> propaganda.

I can't get Transact where I live at the moment and I don't pay
attention to propaganda.  (-:


Tim.