Just traditional ADSL over prexisting phone lines? Or was it the original U-Verse?
I recall U-Verse was fiber to the neighborhood, and then there were these big ugly boxes that had short run DSL lines to the customer. I think they could guarantee reasonably high speeds (maybe a max 24 mbit/sec) as long as the line was short. But it was a kludge since cable was typically faster. I remember when SBC (and its subsidiaries like Pacific Bell) had commercials for its DSL service claiming that cable internet bogged down because of too many users sharing cable in the same neighborhood, but I never saw that when I visited someone with cable internet.
What did they call it?
Fiber to the node. Like U-Verse.
Fiber to the curb. But still using DSL technology rather than a transmission line or twisted-pair.
Fiber to the home. Basically what people can get these days.
Fiber to the desk. That would be interesting. Although most home users use Wi-Fi at home, maybe there's a future with homes with fiber instead of ethernet cables in walls.
From memory there were a ton of different configurations of Uverse in our area. All of them were fiber to the node, and none of them amounted to much more than an 'upgraded' ADSL. Although, if memory serves, they did offer us IP TV and not DirectTV so they must have somehow had the bandwidth for it. Not sure, it has been some time since we cancelled it.
My original install had a giant outdoor 'modem' and a smaller router inside. (Or whatever their names for them were). This was over 2 twisted pairs from the DSLAM. I think we were at 18/3 then, or 12/3, can't remember.
Later they did a speed upgrade (to 25 down!!!) and did away with the outside box. This required a card upgrade in the DSLAM which took some massive hoop jumping on my part to get them to do. Still over the twisted pairs. We had something like 6mb outbound and 25 inbound with it....on a good day.
Either way, it was crap. It was crap when it started and it was crap when I cancelled it. Every time it rained our speeds would drop or we'd get knocked offline, if you saturated outbound speeds (3mb at the time!!!) it would completely hose inbound. The neighborhood was built in 2007, so its not like it was some crusty old development with crap lines, they were all fairly new.
For all of the horror stories with Comcast, they have been pretty much rock solid for us. The biggest outage was about a day when a big storm came through and absolutely obliterated one of their hubs(switch?, didn't get a good look at it when they had it open) just down from my house. The poor guy worked on that thing for something like 6 hours to get it back up and going. He said it was one of the worst lightning cleanups he'd ever done and that it must have taken a direct hit. *shrug* Still not bad for all the stories you hear.
--Edit--
Sent me down the internet equipment rabbit hole.
The outdoor unit was a 2wire I3812V
Just as I remembered. Bonded pair technology.......for the suck.
almost time to make a move.
