Tue, 05 Oct 2004

ADSL upgrade

Yesterday I wasn't able to log into my home server from the office, and I assumed the load had skyrocketed again, as it happens every now and then. Timing was quite bad because I'm very busy in the evenings these days, but I went to my father's house to see what was going on, and when I got there I saw the server was mostly idling. WTF? Shortly after I noticed my local named wouldn't resolve barely anything, and I couldn't ssh out, as the connection would hang in the middle of the handshakes. I started looking at my 3com router configuration, seemed ok; rebooted the box, nothing changed; started cursing, which changed nothing either... until I realized it was probably a telco thing. I told my father "it'll probably be fixed automagically" and left the house.

When I came back from training, I managed to ssh in and quickly tested the downstream speed. As I suspected, the downtime was caused by Telefónica tweaking our stuff to upgrade the ADSL's of the area from 256/128 to 512/128. Uplink still sucks, but oh well, we got this for "free" (ie, we still pay way to much for crappy connections in Spain, but we're slowly getting what the rest of Europe seems to have).

Moreover, today the cable company finally opened up the street and installed their stuff to offer their service. 5 or 6 years late...

10:30 | [] | # | (comments: 6)

With euro it's easy now to make comparisons in Europe, here in Italy Telecom Italia, the "ex" telco monopoly, sell 640/256 flat ADSL at 36,95 euro for month, if you ask me this is lot of money.

P.S. The same company sells in France 1024/512 flat ADSL at 10.95 euro for month, this sucks

Posted by Andrea at Tue Oct 5 12:58:58 2004

in germany, deutsche telekom sells

1024/128 for 16,99 eur
2048/192 for 19,99 and
3072/384 for 24,99

(all without traffic... you can subscribe to traffic from different companies, flatrates from telekom starts at 29,99 (1024) up to 49,99 (3 mbit))
there are other companies selling dsl, but most use the telekom backbone outside of large cities

Posted by cs at Tue Oct 5 19:51:33 2004

cs: What do you mean with "without traffic"? That there's a traffic limit?

Anyway, all of that seems to be quite a lot cheaper than here.

The now standard 512/128 ADSL is around 39€ + VAT.
The standard was 256/128 until this month. Some smaller telco's have a few better offers, but with lots of smallprint. And anyway, as in Germany, it's still Telefónica reselling the stuff to the others, so better ignore the fact that they have been real assholes for a long time during and after the monopoly and go with them...

Posted by Jordi at Wed Oct 6 01:23:15 2004

no, without traffic means there is a ZERO BYTE TRAFFIC LIMIT ;-)

you pay the 16,99 just to be connected to adsl... then you can choose another company to provide you with the traffic subscription (or go with the telekom plans). traffic subscription are e.g. 6,99 for 4 GB / Month at gmx.de

Posted by cs at Wed Oct 6 13:27:41 2004

Aaah, that's not good either. I don't know how many GB's we use at home, because there's no limit in Spain.

I should probably do some calculation for one month.

Posted by Jordi at Wed Oct 6 14:09:58 2004

www.safecom.cn

Posted by nimat at Fri Jan 6 08:14:08 2006