Bandwidth tales: gulker.com sits at the end of a telephone line that is just a bit too far for reliable DSL. The history is that we started off in '95 as ISDN customers with GeoNET (thanks, John!), which was sold to Level 3, who dumped ISDN. So we signed up with Concentric as one of their first Menlo Park DSL customers. We're so far from the telco switch that it took a technician most of a long day to get us up, and then on an IDSL connection at a roaring 144K.

XO acquired Concentric, but DSL still isn't stable at our distance from the switch. Our 144K connection costs $153 a month, which seemed a bit steep by current standards (XO offers 400K SDSL for that price elsewhere).

So today, Comcast dropped off a cable modem, and now the desktop machines at gulker.com are running on a 3 mbps/256 kbps ADSL connection - for $45 a month (with a 4-month enticement of $25/mo.). The gulker.com wireless node is also on that line... amazing... more than 15x real-world performance increase. The 3 mbps makes quite a difference over 144K ... we'll be migrating the servers eventually (the 256K is still better - and much cheaper - than XO's 144K)... Comcast offers static IPs for $20 a month...
Comments 11:04:32 PM    

Chris Gulker's view from Silicon Valley - in words and pictures