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Comment by Eikon | Hacker News Reader

I'm wondering, how prevalent is DSL in the US?

In France, cable is basically non-existent except in a few large cities. DSL is everywhere as legacy infrastructure and fiber coverage over the whole country is increasing at a fast rate.

Is the US in a somewhat similar situation or is cable found pretty much anywhere?

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Average cable coverage in the US is significantly higher than Europe. However, inside Europe there is large variance between the different countries. E.g. Belgium has nearly 100% coverage, while France as you correctly observed has very little. France is a-typical for Europe in broadband reach, lagging the average significantly.

https://www.broadband-mapping.eu/public-portal/

Snapshots from 2012 including technology mix

http://point-topic.com/free-analysis/mapping-broadband-cover...

Cable is probably the leader in most markets in the US. DSL hasn’t been given the same innovation love, so in markets where it is still marketed (primarily by AT&T) the speeds are almost always lower/capped at 50Mbps down. In more rural areas DSL still has a stronger foothold. But in general, yes, cable is quite prevalent.

I haven’t seen DSL at more than 2-3mbps down even around the biggest US cities. The only real high bandwidth download option is cable (coaxial), and the only high bandwidth download and upload is fiber.

AT&T markets a hybrid DSL technology under their UVerse brand name. They run FTTN (fiber to the node), then split from the node via standard DSL, albeit at much closer distances (and hence much higher speeds). This product can provide "DSL" in the 50-200Mb/s range (currently), but it is not the regular DSL that most people associate with the technology.

From what I gather, FTTN itself illustrates the bootstrap problem the US market faces in that in some cases they should have fiber already run to the nodes decades previously, but didn't until the early days of DSL. US Telecoms are nothing if not procrastinators on infrastructure upgrades.

The irony though is that if you are building FTTN new as much of AT&T has been doing the last decade and a half, it's not that much harder to at the same time push all the extra few dozen feet into the Home for FTTH, which Verizon figured out years back and AT&T only finally got a clue much more recently.

(AT&T also hurts their case by charging basically the exact same prices for bad POTS DSL and FTTN DSL, despite the huge variance in speeds, and tend to be not entirely forthright about which option is serviced to a particular address, leaving a lot of US consumers with an overall distrust of DSL.)

Part of the reason the telecoms in the US were slow to upgrade was that they were originally forced to do local loop unbundling. Why invest if competitors could use those lines for cheap rates?

And the cable companies already had a high bandwidth (at least for ~2000) transmission line to most houses in America.

Notably, Verizon tried with FIOS, but it wasn't that profitable. Most people stuck with cable internet, even if it was slower.

This is exactly my experience as well. In DSL's favor I would add that it's not a shared pipe and the latency is generally low and very very consistent. If it were 20-30mbps down DSL would be competitive again. Emotionally I'd like to ditch both the phone and cable providers, they and their exploitive business model suck fetid dingo kidneys.

That's weird, DSL is the most common way of going online in Germany and many providers offer 20-200 Mbit connections

My current ILEC "offers" 100 Mbit DSL, but you have to be within a certain distance of their main infrastructure (I forget what it's called. DMARC, maybe?)

This means it offers 100 Mbit service, but at my house it actually maxes out at 8 Mbit.

DSLAM: Digital subscriber line access multiplexer

That's probably the device you're looking for.

I dunno. The latency would have to be really really really low (like single digit ms) for me to even consider it. My cable is 220mbit down/17.5mbit up (actual measured values).

DSL typically runs at 100/40 or 50/16 now. Some unlucky people are still stuck on ADSL2+ with 16/3 or so.

Some people are stuck with Frontier who won't upgrade anything and can only provide 4Mb, if you're lucky, even with a CO 2500ft away.

FTC (Fiber to the CAB) uses a form of DSL (VDSL) over copper to do the last hop in the UK.

The US problem is no Local loop unbundeling and forced sharing of Central Office space

CenturyLink sells me 100Mb at about half of what cable would cost.

It’s also true that a requirement when buying our house was “less than a mile from the CO”. More recently (like ~ 10 years ago) they put a DSLAM 2 blocks from my house.

Although fiber is available nearby (and further from the CO), they’re not going to wire our neighborhood anytime soon.

Because cable TV was almost universally available and nearly as universally installed (at least in urbanized areas) before home internet access became common, cable is very common in US cities due to the infrastructure already existing.

And since available speeds far outpace DSL for fairly similar prices (or at least they did last time I looked at DSL), a lot of households subscribe to cable — especially where fiber isn’t yet available.

I think this is an important distinction that a lot of people don't realize.

When non-terrestial television became big, North America went largely with cable, while Europe went with satellites. Thus, the infrastructure was already in place for NorthAms to get high speed internet over their existing coax connections.

At my previous home, in a rural part of Ohio, DSL via Windstream was the only option for wired internet. It was advertised as 12mbps download, but after installing it, they told me the best speed they could do was only 7mbps down and 768kbps up - for the same price. It was generally reliable during the day but would often drop to slower speeds during evenings and weekends.

Over the 6~7 years that I lived there, things improved somewhat, with the speed jumping to 11/1.5 and then 21/1.5, and the evening and weekend issues lessened.

The "guaranteed for life" price also went up at least once a year. (The base price remained the same, but they kept adding new fees.)

I was never really satisfied with the speed, price, or reliability from Windstream.

At my new home, in town, I have a cable internet through Spectrum (Time Warner) which was advertised at 940mbps down and 35mbps up, and it often exceeds that by a few mbps.

DSL is also an option, but the fastest speed I saw advertised was 45mbps.

DSL development is so far behind, that it has been eclipsed by cable. DSL has such a short range of coverage (only works a few miles from a phone exchange facility), that it never became available to most of the countryside, while cable has become available even in many very rural areas. DSL is also around 10 times slower (or more) than cable here, in most cases.

Very uncommon. I would wager fiber is more common than DSL.

DSL has a relatively limited range compared to cable, and the US is more rural/suburban than Europe. So ISPs put more effort into cable. Economy of scale meant that cable won out over DSL. If 80% of your customers need cable in order to achieve acceptable performance, and 20% of your customers will be better off with DSL but cable still works fine, the ISP is just going to ship 100% cable.

With the ubiquitousness of bundled cable TV/cable internet/cable telephone, (which is VOIP that looks like POTS to the average consumer) a lot of the actual POTS providers started switching over to the cable business model. Resulting in even less investment in the DSL technology stack. It's basically dead.

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