Click below on a question to see a detail answer.

DSL

1. What is DSL?
2. What are the advantages of DSL over cable and dial-up?
3. Why is distance important with DSL?
4. Must I install additional telephone lines to use DSL?
5. Will my Macintonsh (Apple) work with DSL?
6. Can I fax over DSL?
7. How long does it take from order to install?
8. Does anyone have to visit my house?
9. I live in an apartment, not a house. Can I still get DSL?
10. Can I use a laptop with DSL?
11. Latency vs. Bandwidth: What is it?

WIRELESS INTERNET

1. What is Wireless Internet?
2. Is wireless Internet faster than my 56k dial-up connection?
3. Do I need special equipment?
4. Am I in your service area?
5. Can I be on the internet all the time with wireless internet?
6. I have more than 2 computers in my home. Can they both be connected to wireless internet?

DSL

1. What is DSL?
   DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) is an always-on internet connection that ends in a socket on your wall, that looks much like a phone socket. At least in the US, the socket is exactly a phone socket, and, for the popular residential DSL, (ADSL), the same housewiring does indeed carry phone and data!

   DSL is billed per month, usually for a fixed price, and for the majority of providers, for unlimited usage. In other words. whether you use it for email once a day, or you are a net addict and use it constantly, your bill is always the same.

   Once you have a DSL line, you can use the entire resources of the internet, in the same way as you did from a regular modem connecting to an ISP like mindspring or ibm.net, except you can use them 24 hours a day, with no connection delay, and usually (although not always) without a 'username' and 'password', and without a busy signal or any connection/disconnection process (USWest offers a economy DSL product that does have a connection process however).

   The key advantage of DSL over modem is speed. DSL is from several, to dozens, of times faster than a modem connection. A complex web page that could take up to a minute to finish loading, can appear in just seconds over DSL.

   Connection speed, reliability, and the 'always-on' nature of DSL, are the main reasons it is so popular. For small businesses, DSL is also a great way to save money compared to pay per minute ISDN service, or expensive T1 lines.

    

2. What are the advantages of DSL over cable and dial-up?
   Cable modems are typically faster for downloads than most if not all DSL lines, when the cable infrastructure is new or well maintained. However, cable has a few disadvantages to DSL.

   The first disadvantage is that cable is an RF network -- this means that it is vulnerable to transient problems "within the network" from RF interference. Since cable is a shared media, there is a possibility that performance may degrade over time as additional households plug in, connect additional devices (videos, game machines) to the TV lines.

   A cable company may react slowly to decreases in performance, as they never sell access by speed, or promise consistent speed or latency.

   One of the largest disadvantages of cable over DSL is the upstream (return path). Cable companies are using a very narrow band for return signalling, below all the space allocated for TV channels. This band is prone to RF interference and is very limited in capacity. Upstream transmissions may therefore compete with others in the area, get delayed (suffer high latency) due to noise fighting techniques, and cable Terms Of Service typically prohibit any kind of constant upstream use. Internet use is shifting away from central servers broadcasting to many individuals and some interesting peer to peer applications are appearing (games, voice and video applications, communal libraries). These applications need a strong upstream channel.

   In summary, cable modems are currently good value and strong competition for residential casual use, often available more cheaply and far faster than their ADSL competition. However, DSL is probably the more future-proof system, offering digital direct from the internet infrastructure.. If your DSL ISP is on the ball, your performance in either direction will not be different from peak hour to early morning, and DSL lines are available for a wide variety of purposes, both business and residential.

    

3. Why is distance important with DSL?
   If you have heard even something about DSL, you will have heard about distance. Your phone lines normally terminate at a telco office, usually nearby. This distance, (the length of your line between your location and the telco office), is a very important factor in whether or not you can get DSL, and what speed you can get.

   Here are some rules of thumb for distance ranges. Please be aware that especially with non Telco ADSL lines, distance limits for speeds can vary widely from company to company. There are cases where it is policy for "residential" DSL lines not to be offered as far out as functionally identical "business" products!

    

4. Must I install additional telephone lines to use DSL?
   That answer to this question is maybe. It usually depends on your local telephone company and DSL technology.

   In some areas, the answer is "no", a single phone line is all that is required (i.e. line-sharing). For instance, ADSL operates at a different set of frequencies than standard voice telephones do. The difference in frequencies allows both voice traffice and IP (internet) traffic to co-exist on the same phyisical phone line. You simply need to obtain line filters to plug in to the wall jacks you wish to use for normal voice telephones.

   Unfortunatly, in other areas or different types of DSL (such as SDSL), the answer is yes. When technology allows but DSL provider may still prefer to install DSL on seperate loop due to technical reasons or due to regulatory reasons.

    

5. Will my Macintonsh (Apple) work with DSL?
   The Macintosh computing platform accesses the internet through the same protocols that the Windows computing platform does. This means that theoretically, any type of internet service Windows computers can use, the Macintosh can as well.

   Two things to watch out for... One is the hardware. The DSL modems require your computer to have an ethernet card installed, and some computers don't have them already. If yours doesn't have one already, many providers will give you one to install. You'll have to make sure that it is Macintosh compatible (most are). The second is the software. Most providers will have the software to get you connected, but you'll have to ask them for it specifically, or else they'll probably assume you're on a Windows machine.

    

6. Can I fax over DSL?
   You cannot FAX over a DSL connection.. you can still send and receive faxes over your regular telephone lines though.

   Upgrading to DSL may add a DSL modem of some kind, but if you keep your old modem, you can still use software fax products like winfaxpro -- they simply use your telephone line as before, although you still have to plug in a telephone line as well!

   This holds true whether or not you get ADSL over your home phone or SDSL on another line.

   You may also try the internet solution, and subscribe to a sevice like jfax.com or efax.com which provides you your own dedicated fax number, and you may send faxes using a utility, and receive fax messages (and voice messages!) in your mail inbox.

    

7. How long does it take from order to install?
   Depends on demand. Anywhere from one week to two weeks.
   
    
8. Does anyone have to visit my house?
   Generally, yes. If you do not get DSL from the Telco, the telco still has to provide the (new) copper line, which involves terminating it at the 'de-marc' point, then the DSL providing company (CLEC) comes to do any necessary inside wiring. In many cases, the communication between the Telco and the CLEC (Covad, Northpoint etc), is not great, and the line cannot be found, or is not left sufficiently close to the premise, necessitating further visits and delays.

   For Telco ADSL, however, an existing line can be converted to an ADSL line, and the Telco may just have to visit to install a splitter or a filter, and/or upgrade the NID (which is the phone junction box in your premise. See this Bellsouth page for examples of different NIDs).

    

9. I live in an apartment, not a house. Can I still get DSL?
   You should be able to get DSL service provided by the local phone company assuming your lines support it, and soon from CLECs once their line sharing agreements are in place in most apartment buildings. Whether you can get DSL that needs to be run over a separate copper pair depends on whether the apartment building management will allow a new copper pair to be installed into the phone box along with the wiring up to your apartment.
   
    
10. Can I use a laptop with DSL?
    You can use a laptop with DSL almost as easily as a desktop. Instead of an internal modem, or ethernet card, you need to buy a PCMCIA card supporting 10/100 ethernet (if your laptop has no ethernet port on it). They are a little expensive.

    The other option is to select a USB DSL modem when getting a line (if your laptop has a USB port on it).

    Apart from the choice of ethernet PCMCIA card, or USB modem, everything else is the same as a desktop DSL connection.

     

11. Latency vs. Bandwidth: What is it?
    One of the most commonly misunderstood concepts in networking is speed and capacity. Most people believe that capacity and speed are the same thing. For example, it's common to hear "How fast is your connection", invariably, the answer will be "640K, 1.5M" or something similar. These answers are actually referring to the bandwidth or capacity of the service, not speed.

    Speed(latency) and capacity(bandwidth) are two very separate things. The combination of latency and bandwidth give users the perception of how quickly a webpage loads or a file is transferred. it doesn't help that broadband providers keep referring to "get high speed access" when they probably should be saying "get high capacity access". Notice the term "Broadband", it refers to how wide the pipe is, not how fast.

    The most common example to compare latency and bandwidth is:

    Imagine water running through a pipe. The pressure is latency, the width of the pipe is bandwidth. If you have a wide pipe but low pressure, you can move more water through the pipe but at a slower rate. If you have a narrow pipe but high pressure, you can move less water but at a faster rate.

    Another example that is sometimes given:

    Imagine people in an aircraft. In this example, people are the data packets, the size of the aircraft is the bandwidth, and the speed of the aircraft is the latency. A 747 can carry about 400 people but a 707 can carry only 200 people. Both fly at about 500knots. If both leave New York at the same time, they will arrive in Los Angeles at the same time. Notice that although, the 747 has more capacity (or bandwidth) it is the same speed(latency) as the 707.

    Latency is normally expressed in milliseconds. One of the most common methods is use the utility ping. A small packet of data, typically 32 bytes, is send to a host and the time is measured. Normally, the RTT (round-trip time, time it takes for the packet to leave the source host, travel to the destination host and return back to the source host) is measured.

    Bandwidth is normally expressed in bits per second. It's the amount of data that can be transferred during a second.

    Solving bandwidth is easier than solving latency. To solve bandwidth, more pipes are added. For example, in early analog modems it was possible to increase bandwidth by bonding two or more modems. In fact, ISDN achieves 128K of bandwidth by bonding 2 64K channels using a datalink protocol called multilink-ppp.

    The following are typical latencies as reported by others of popular circuits type to the first hop. Please remember however that latency on the Internet is also effected by routing that an ISP may perform (ie, if your data packet has to travel further, latencies increase).

    Ethernet .3ms

    Analog Modem 100-200ms

    ISDN 15-30ms

    DSL/Cable 10-20ms

    Satellite >100ms

    DS1/T1 2-5ms

    Bandwidth and latency are connected. If the bandwidth is saturated then congestion occurs and latency is increased. However, if the bandwidth of a circuit is not at peak, the latency will not decrease. Bandwidth can always be increased but latency cannot be decreased. Latency is the function of the electrical characteristics of the circuit.

WIRELESS INTERNET

1. What is Wireless Internet?
   Wireless Internet is high-speed Internet access which uses high frequency radio waves instead of telephone lines to connect you to the Internet. Your computer is hooked up to an antenna on your roof or utility pole that transmits radio waves to our tower in Vegreville. In turn, this tower connects you to our Internet backbone.
   
    
2. Is wireless Internet faster than my 56k dial-up connection?
   Yes! Depending on the package you choose, you will experience Internet at a much faster rate than your current modem can offer you. DigitalWeb Wireless offers three different connection speeds. Remember, however, that no matter how fast your connection, speeds on the Internet itself can affect performance. Things that can affect speed include the server load of the website you are visiting, Internet traffic patterns at certain times of the day, router efficiency and backbone usage.
   
    
3. Do I need special equipment?
   Other than a computer, you will need a network interface card in your computer and a modem and antenna. The network interface card is your responsibility, although you can purchase them from us and we can install them for you. The modem and antenna remain the property of DigitalWeb Wireless, and the cost for using them is included in your monthly wireless access fee.
   
    
4. Am I in your service area?
   Please check the map on our Wireless page to determine if you are able to receive and transmit the radio signals from our tower.
   
    
5. Can I be on the Internet all the time with a wireless connection?
   Yes. DigitalWeb Wireless is an always-on service. Connecting is as easy as starting up your web browser. There is no waiting for a dial-up connection.
   
    
6. I have more than one computer in my home. Can they both be connected to wireless Internet?
   By networking two or more computers together, they can all have simultaneous access to wireless Internet. Typically, each computer would have a network interface card installed in it, and then the computers would be connected by Ethernet cables. There are also other home network configurations available that work with wireless Internet, but this is the most common.