8.23 – A commercial around here from Comcast cable services has renewed a little knowledge about DSL and data speeds. For broadband cable, there are several choices you have when deciding how to receive it. Digital Subscriber Line through the phone company (typically), your cable company can transmit a signal through the same wires your television channels travel, and more complex options exist for businesses and remote locations.

Different connections travel at different speeds that depend on many factors. The most important factors are the type of wires used and your distance from the provider. Although electricity would love to move at the speed of light, data is purposely slowed down to prevent burning things like lightning along the way. DSL’s two tiny wires require that it be the slowest of all broadband.

Anything that travels is subjected to a force called attenuation. As something, like light, moves farther from its source, its strength dies out or attenuates. Again, DSL is the slowest player since its signal is the first to attenuate into uselessness. The Comcast comercial features the Slowsky’s; a happily married pair of turtles move as far away from the DSL terminal as possible to get the worst Internet connection possible. See the Slowsky turtles.

Testing your own broadband connection is a breeze with a free test from BandWidthPlace.com’s SpeedTest. Their test doesn’t request that you lower your firewalls and protections like most other sites. My computer at home came in at 2.7MB per second. I had the results ‘explained to me’ and a neat and tidy little clarification page came up here. C|NET also offers a good tester here. It reported the same broadband connection to be 2806.1 kbps or 2.8MB per second (if you shift the decimal point around).

Both C|NET and BandWidthPlace rate my home connection solidly in the range of a T1 connection which is nice to know! A sparse explanation of various high-speed connections here, and a discussion about that page here at DIGG.com

Where T1 used to be the bragging rite of geeks looking to sound a part of something marvelous, it’s now T3 they claim. According to BroadbandLocators.com, “depending on your location and T3 provider availability, your full T3 service will normally be priced between $3,000 and $12,000 monthly.” So it’s safe to say, “bullshit,” to the faces of folks who don’t fess up to the fact that they’re merely sharing in part of the resale of some big company’s T3.

So this T1 that my home Cable connection exceeds… It’s cost ranges from $300 to $1,200 a month and I’m paying about $22.95 for the next five months thanks to a promotion. Then it’s about $40 a month. If you’ve had a bug about starting an online Internet business or wondered what advantages you have in your favor to working from home, start with some knowledge about the value of your dollar. Test your connection speed, switch if you like and enjoy working in your PJ’s with coffee close at hand as I’m doing now….

Really dry further studying on DSL attenuation: From Harvard; A Forum at Whirlpool.net; At UserTools.Plus.net; and pages of DSL testing stuff from TeleByteUSA.com