Whats special about xDSL?
The cables connecting most households to the phone network are mainly simple twisted pair copper wires, which have only been able to carry analogue traffic. Modem speeds have gradually increased through the use of various compression and other techniques,but at today’s fastest (56 kilobits per second (kbps) they are approaching the theoretical limit for this technology. DSL technology enables much higher speeds across the twisted pair lines from the exchange to the home. Speeds up to 2 Megabits per second are readily achievable – 30 or more times faster than today’s fastest modems. This means that consumers and teleworkers can use applications that need these higher speeds even if their town or village doesn’t have new, high performance cable networks. DSL has its own kind of “modems”. Also, the technology allows the network to manage traffic rather than allocating complete end-to-end circuits, so that from the user perspective it can appear that the data connection is “always on”. xDS
