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What exactly is DSL hell?


Frontier - sold 7Mbit down that actually operated at about 1.5mbit during business hours and would peak at 5mbit from 2a-4am if I had to download something - that despite the modem actually syncing up at 7mbit. It was entirely their network too, my SNR was good enough to do 25mbit+ if they had offered it.

Latency generally in the hundreds of ms because their network was so congested any traffic leaving it was a joke. Netflix was literally the only thing that worked for content (sometimes) and I'd assume that only worked through a combination of excellent bandwidth management on the part of Netflix and a caching server somewhere local on the Frontier network.

My dial-up in the 90s was better from a reliability and consistency perspective. I ended up having to install mosh on all of my systems because SSH sessions would timeout so frequently on Frontier's garbage network.


768kbps upload bandwidth, that is closer to 500kbps.


Try 1.5Mb download. 3Mb if you’re lucky.




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