I was contacted by SBC last year about participating in a trial of their ADSL2 product. They promised speeds of up to 12Mb/s downstream and offered me 3 months of free standard ADSL after the trial program. My 802.11g network fit the requirements and I signed up. I didn’t mention that I run Linux since one of the requirements was that you run Windows XP or OS X. I’ve worked with the SBC technicians before and most of them are familiar with Linux so I figured it wouldn’t be an issue.
A technician made three visits to my house over the course of the trial. The first was to install the new modem. Sure enough, he took one look at my desktop and said, “which distro is that?” He had no problem navigating my GNOME desktop. There wasn’t actually any software that needed to be installed so he spent most of his time in Firefox running various tests and web-based configuration programs.
I didn’t notice much speed increase immediately. They ramped up my speed bit by bit, however, over the next few weeks. On the second visit, the same technician installed a splitter and did some work on my lines. At that point I was able to get about 8Mb/s downstream and at times, close to 1Mb/s upstream. The speed never got much higher than that.
I enjoyed these speeds for about 2 months. From time to time I would run speed tests and report the data to SBC. On the final visit they removed the ADSL2 equipment and restored me back to my previous setup. I was a bit disappointed that I wasn’t able to consistently get 10 or 12 Mb/s downstream. But 8 Mb/s was a nice improvement over the 1.5 Mb/s that I was getting before the trial. It made downloading new Linux distributions over Bittorrent extremely quick. High resolution streaming video was more feasible as well, which is really where SBC will be targetting this product. I am eager to learn when they will begin offering this and what they will charge.
Tags: Web
