Qwest/CL DSL has always proven spotty *at times* with anyone I've ever
known using it. As a network guy I inquire with fellow geeks I know,
and they let me know. Generally the residential side of Qwest/CL fairly
weak on troubleshooting most issues because of simple physical problems
that often cannot easily be overcome with 2wire systems. If you can get
VDSL, it's decent from what I've heard, as long as you have new wiring,
in a new area, and live close to where every they dropped the local
dslam. Most fall NOT into this category.
Data comes in the form of modulation, and consider 10baset requires 4
wires still, gig ethernet 8. 2-wire is poop compared to the modulation
and speed capable on _shielded_ coax. Qwest has simply had to push the
envelope with dsl tech to remain relevant in the market, eventually
resorting to new wiring (twisted-pair i think), often with some
shielding now to achieve it which is hardly traditional for a telco
outside of business service. Eventually they had to begin to roll fiber
as they were reaching unpractical limitations in their 2wire tech to
modulate data at *competitive speeds*.
Fixed point-to-multipoint ala old sprint broadband and various others
operate in parts that do it too now, sometimes a decent alternative
where available I've heard (cave creek area). At least until it is
oversubscribed to hell. Sprint acquired independents here in town
setting them up, but ultimately they oversold it to death, and finally
shot it in the head to finish years later. Not sure this isn't the
eventual outcome of any wireless deployment.
Satellite is a last-resort option with as stated, latency and bandwidth
caps (extreme point-to-multipoint far, far away).
If celco's weren't so greedy/proud of wireless LTE tech, it would be
decent as a fixed solution as well as mobile as latency and throughput
is much improved. I couldn't run the small datacenter in my house with
it though. I can however get a LTE EHWIC for a Cisco router now that
customers can and do use as a "backup" solution when someone back-hoe's
your businesses fiber.
Qwest/CL fiber deployment, like fios is "pon", passive-optical network
based. These are not to be confused with anything like optical
ethernet, sonet, dwdm, etc that are "active" optics. Cable, dsl, most
non-optical (generally) are subject to async behavior as you have a
small modem, and a very large cmts and active amplifier network driving
very large coax feeds at headends and active optical from there. Fiber
doesn't have so much those physical limitations so long as the laser can
use power in the diode to shoot your frames from here to there some ways
(active zx single-mode optics can shoot 60km for gige, raman based dwdm
amps much further). PON is a cost-effective way of aggregating fiber in
a controlled fashion as you somewhat would a copper plant, only now the
techs roll with portable fusion splicers and otdr's instead of qam test
kit for coax.
Cable is where it's at, when fiber is not. I've too worked at cox, and
actually back to @home and offshoot isp back in the day when they
started the tech before cox as media whores figured out what IP was.
The modulation and timing that drives docsis 3.0 is very scalable for a
copper means, and it's nothing cox will need to dig up and replace
anytime soon. Other than being a bit proud of watching and working it
along the way, it's solid tech.
I have some issues with Cox ultimately, but they are one of the less
evil of the isp's out there, and generally have much improved stability
over most anything else. Generally speaking, the only time I call them
is when truly something dies (arizona is hell on coax), as I don't
require network support otherwise. I've used them off and on a good 14
years for data, and as long as you have a clean physical connection
(modem levels can tell you/them this), it's pretty damn solid. Business
services gets you someone out to fix your stuff asap vs. 2-3 bd, and
open ports (cox blocks surprisingly less than you might think these days
on residential - not even https).
So far pon is driving speeds comparable to cable with qam docsis 3.0 now
that they're channel-bonding to aggregate much as wireless tech does in
802.11n. Pon is capable of 10g speed down, 2.5gb up. That is why cox
and other cable mso/isp's killed analog off, to reclaim huge/clean
spectrum to reuse for wide-band operation across more spectrum to
compete with this. They're ability with modems and cmts channel/timing
management to auto-provision docsis allows them to optimize
channel/spectrum bonding/mimo usage, allowing them to simply keep adding
more bandwidth.
Data on cable used to be shoehorned into a small chunk of spectrum (what
good is data? cox, circa 1996). Now that wastful tech is off, it gives
them more channels to use from 200khz to 6.4mhz. Things like qam at 128
now allows for huge modular data streams, and diver
