On Sun, 08 May 2005 18:51:45 GMT, "Von Fourche"
wrote:

I think I'm going to give a call to SBC Monday and sign up. I also
think I should be able to save some money. I have a separate phone line in
the house in the corner of the living room for the dial-up. I will call and
switch that phone line number to the regular phone line number. Then I will
have only one phone number coming into the house so I will only have to pay
for that number. Then sign up for the DSL package.

The DSL runs over the phone line? A person talking on the phone will
not hear the DSL data, right? Do people ever hear the DSL data while on the
phone? Are problems common?

Also, you need an Ethernet card. My computer is about five years old
now. It did come with a
10/100Mb PCI NIC. Is that an Ethernet card? I've never used it. Will it
work even tho I have never used it since I got the computer five years ago?

Any network interface labeled as "10/100 Mbps" is the sort of
Ethernet card that your DSL modem expects. The jack looks like
an oversized version of the RJ-11 telephone jack. The modem
installation kit may include both Ethernet and USB cables. Use
Ethernet. Connecting a broadband modem through the USB requires
another layer of software that's something else to go wrong.

The DSL signal occupies a wide band of frequencies above the
voice range. To make sure that you don't hear interference in
phone calls, you plug a little filter between the line and each
telephone. The modem installation kit will include at least
one, and you can get more at places like Radio Shack.

Two non-obvious things about broadband:

When you establish your account password, write it down and lock
it up somewhere where you won't forget where you put it. With
an always-on broadband account, you don't enter your password
unless service is interrupted. By then, you will have forgotten
it.

While you are downloading a big file, you can continue surfing
the Web. Each page you jump to steals a only few hundred
miliseconds from the download. You can even start two big
downloads at once. They will share the available bandwidth, so
the total time won't be any longer than if you'd run them
sequentially. The total time might even be shorter, if both
servers are too slow to use all of your DSL bandwidth. As I
mentioned, I regularly download Linux distributions that fill an
entire CD-ROM. Sometimes it takes 30 minutes, but I can read my
email or newsgroups while I'm waiting, and the Internet protocol
stack will take care of routing the various data packets to
their proper destinations in my system.