On Sunday, May 24, 2015 at 8:24:00 AM UTC-4, wrote:
On Sun, 24 May 2015 07:42:48 -0400, Art Todesco
wrote:



Yes, if you are over certain distances, they bump your speed down one
notch. In my case, I'm connected to a remote site just down the
mountain. I think I'm being bumped down to 3MB (from 6MB) because they
think I'm over 15K feet, which I don't believe, as you can see where the
cable runs by following their pedestals. BTW, they still charge the
same. Also, prior to Frontier buying the copper base phone system from
Verizon, the speeds where ok during the day or wee hours in the morning,
however, late afternoon and early evening were a disaster. The speeds
were slower than dialup. I complained and the guy in India (Bob) said
that I can't power the modem from an outlet strip; it must be plugged
directly in the wall. When Frontier bought the system, they had to add
lots and lots of bandwidth to make DSL work at close to advertised
speeds. Now I routinely get about 2.8MB down. I've got to give Frontier
credit, they've really fixed what Verizon couldn't or actually what they
didn't want to fix, because they knew they were selling off that part of
the business. Same goes for the batteries in the remote site. If there
was a power failure, the batteries might last for a minute and then
there was not dial tone. Frontier has fixed all that. Sounds like
Frontier it great? Not. I could, but won't go into all their problems.


These days the "central office" can just be another box on the side of
the road. It only has to get your copper signal up on the fiber.

Even decades ago they had what amount to concentrators, if you will,
where your copper phone line terminated, was multiplexed with signals
from other folks lines, and then went on T1 or similar back to the CO.
Typical place they were used would be a new subdivision that was
away from the CO. Easier/cheaper to get them all on one line instead
of physically connecting each new house direct to the CO.