ADSL – Asymmetric digital Subscriber Line
On the face of it ADSL seems great, the marketing blurb ISP’s tell us that you can get upto 24Mb down load on adsl2+ But in reality it is very much less than that.
It’s adapted
ADSL uses copper lines, otherwise know as phone lines, very good for carrying sound not so good for carrying data. It been adapted for that purpose due to the fact that most businesses and homes have a phone line already in place. However the further your business is from the telephone exchange (those funny looking Telstra boxes at the side of the road) the weaker the signal line is and therefore the lower amount of Mbps you get when you try to download something. Bad/old copper will also affect the quality of the connection.
It’s asymmetric
More of the line is used for downloading data than uploading data. Fine for downloading music for your iTunes account not so good for sending an email with a large attachment as this goes up in the upload side of the line or when you save a document in a cloud based server the same issue applies.
It’s shared
Imagine your internet connection is a road and the cars on that road are your data (bits and bytes) moving along a highway, now imaging everyone else around where your business is moving their data down the same highway, they are using/sharing the same network you do. This will slow your connection down.
It’s cheap
Yes it is. As low at $50 per month for an unlimited data plan. Very good value…. for home use that is. As detailed above you get what you pay for, it sounds like you get quite a lot. Marketing throws out words like unlimited, super-fast, world class customer service etc. However the reality is, it really is no good for cloud solutions.
