[Techtalk] Linux and home Internet connections

[Wim De Smet]

On 8/22/05, Mary <mary-linuxchix at puzzling.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 22, 2005, Kathryn Andersen wrote:
> > Well, as far as I understand, ADSL *is* a permanent connection.
> > If you only want to surf the web a few times a week, then you're better
> > off with dialup, probably.
> 
> It's potentially permanent, as in, when you connect, you're pretty much
> guarenteed a connection that will last 'forever' (for values of
> 'forever' that are usually about four weeks on my provider, and then
> they have a network outage for half an hour or so). But many people do
> not actually use it as a permanent connection: they connect when they
> want to, or when their computer is on.

You're pretty lucky in being able to be on for four weeks. My provider
cycles all the ip's once every 48 hours. Pretty annoying, but the
service is otherwise good (eg. no outages for the past 6 months or so)

> [...] 
> Its big disadvantage is not so much that it's overkill for him as that
> it's expensive relative to dialup. So I'd certainly reommend price and
> feature comparisons, but not that he reject ADSL solely on the basis
> that he won't be using it as much as it's available.

I don't know about price in other parts of the world, but it's dirt
cheap compared to dial up here for one reason only, we pay per minute
for our phone connections. So dialup gets really expensive really
fast, while ADSL has a permanent connection that we pay a monthly fee
for. I guess in a country where dialup is also a monthly fee it is
cheaper to stick with smallband and it can't get more expensive.
Though you'll definitely get tired of waiting for images to load
surfing the modern internet.

greets,
Wim