What is Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) Internet?

DSL, or Digital Line Subscriber Internet is when companies, traditionally the old telephone companies use their old copper lines to provide internet connections to their subscribers. First, most Internet connections came into people's houses through dial up. That is when the computer would dial a number and connect to another computer and through that computer they would connect to the world wide web. The trouble was that when you were using dial up connection you couldn't also use your telephone because the computer was using the phone line.

Then, the phone companies figured out how to be able to use the phone at the same time as being connected to the Internet. They just use a different frequency that the phone call. Usually thay have to have a filter to separate the signals. This is called DSL or digital line subscribers. It was a better, faster connection than dial up. The legacy telephone companies like AT&T, EarthLink, CenturyLink and Frontier offer DSL Internet.

About the same time, cable companies figured out that they could also use their cable lines coming into people's homes to connect them to the Internet. Cable Internet connection was much faster than dial up too. The cable companies like Charter, Comcast, Mediacom and Cox all offer high speed cable Internet.

Both cable companies and telephone companies have been upgrading to fiber optic lines to improve the speed of Internet connections and high speed fiber optic Internet is avaiable in many areas.

AT&T. DSL and Gfast

DSL (digital subscriber line) has been around for almost as long as the Internet itself. There are a lot of Internet Providers that provide DSL Internet connections. It is easy to find the DSL providers in your area.

A few years ago, at the Broadband World Forum in Amsterdam, Netherlands, some tech companies announced a new technology that can bring DSL up to a speed of 1 gigabit per second. That's a lot better than the speed of the technology when Internet started to come into homes some twenty years ago.

The new technology is called Gfast. Gfast gives a big boost to DSL at a lower cost than installing fiber.

Of course these days, everybody wants fast high speed Internet. The reasons are video chat, high-definition video services like YouTube, Netflix, and Hulu, backing up family videos and photos, listening to music from Pandora and Spotify. Most people have a lot of devices in their homes that are connected to the Internet. People have computers, laptops, cell phones, tablets, Xboxes, Internet connected thermostats, TVs, security systems and all of the other Internet of Things devices. DSL is provided by Frontier, CenturyLink, AT&T, Earthlink and others.

AT&T services other Internet Service Providers

Many DSL Internet Service Providers like AT&T, Earthlink, and CenturyLink share certain infrastructure. Whether it is a pole that both have lines running on or  using the cables, wires and other equipment of a competing service provider to more cost effectively provide service to their own clients. It can save them money but it can sometimes also cause a lot of grief.
Usually things roll along fine but recently Mother Lode, a small DSL Internet Service Provider in Sonoma CA, suffered an outage they believe was caused by maintenance issues with the AT&T DSL network they use. AT&T is working to upgrade their network but it is still copper wire in a lot of locations. A major outage for Mother Lode numbers in the hundreds of customers going without service.
“Our copper network up here is very old, subject to moisture, and requires a lot of maintenance,” Mother Lode owner Ben Hulet said. “As they upgrade it to fiber, it’s going to get faster and better."
In addition to using AT&T's DSL infrastructure Mother Lode owns its own wireless Internet network. They also offer dial up Internet service in some areas.
Mother Lode has been providing Internet service to the Sonoma area since 1994. AT&T has been connecting customers around the country for more than a hundred years.

What is DSL?

DSL is high-speed Internet that is always connected. You don't have to dial up every time you want to go online.

These days, DSL (Digital Line Service) Internet is available pretty much everywhere. It didn't use to be that way.

When people first started getting on the Internet they used dial-up service. You actully plugged your computer into the phone line and called a number to connect to the Internet. It was slow. Plus, the trouble was, you couldn't make a phone call when you were logged in with your computer. Luckily the phone companies figured out that customers could actually use the phone to make a call while they were using the Internet using the same copper phone lines that already were coming into their house for their telephone. They could do this because the telephone and Internet signals come in at wavelengths. You probably will need to install a special filter on your telephone line to decrease the amount static generated by having the Internet connection on the same line.

There are two main types of DSL available:

There is ADSL, or Asymmetrical Digital Line Service Internet, which provides faster speed coming down from the web, to the user, that the speed going back up to the web, from the user. This is fine for most uses since people generally download more than the upload.

And there is SDSL or Symmetrical Digital Line Service Internet, which provides the same speed coming down as it does going up. Businesses mostly use this because they need it more for things like video conferencing and other uses that require a lot of uploads.

If you want to check if DSL is available in your zip code click here.

DSL in my area?

You may have wondered, "Is there DSL in my zip code?"
In case you don't know, DSL, or digital subscriber line, is a way to get an Internet connection to a home or business using a line that is probably already installed: the phone line. This is possible because the data signal in a DSL line is a transmitted at a higher frequency than the voice signal and they can both travel on the wire at the same time. Usually a filter is used to separate the two signals. DSL is usually offered by a phone company as opposed to cable Internet that is provided by the cable company. The speed of Internet connection with DSL really depends on how many other DSL customers are getting their Internet connection from the same line as you. The more customers on the same line, the weaker the connection and Internet speed will be. Since it uses telephone lines DSL Internet is available in areas where other options are not available.
Most DSL service today is what they call ADSL or Asymmetric DSL. That means that the speed of downloads is faster than the speed of uploads. This is because usually people download more than they upload, ie, you look at things on websites more than you upload things to websites.