ADSL RAM… the­o­ry and real­i­ty do not match

I am now wait­ing since Decem­ber that my ADSL line is switched to the rate adap­tive mode (RAM). The­o­ret­i­cal­ly it is pos­si­ble. Unfor­tu­nate­ly the real­i­ty does not agree to this (yet).

Luck­i­ly I am not a nor­mal cus­tomer, I know a tech­ni­cian which works for my ISP. He could switch the line with­out prob­lems, but the next update of the sys­tem (which hap­pens from time to time) would can­cel this again, as each update “resets” the sta­tus to what is record­ed in the DB. The prob­lem is, that he can not switch my line to RAM in the DB (actu­al­ly it is not him, he is a net­work tech­ni­cian not one of the sales peo­ple with access to the DB-interface). I am not the only cus­tomer where this is not pos­si­ble. So far they where not able to see a pattern.

Cur­rent­ly there are two col­leagues of him, a friend of him and me which he has as good exam­ples where it does not work (there are more, but those are “just” reg­u­lar cus­tomers). We are now his toys, he wants to find out how to con­vince the sys­tem to switch to RAM in those cas­es. This needs a while, as parts of this need to go the offi­cial way until he sees if it works or not.

I am very hap­py that I am not just a nor­mal cus­tomer. This way it is much more trans­par­ent for me.

ADSL RAM avail­able soon… I hope

I am wait­ing since about two years that my ADSL line gets switched to rate adap­tive mode (ADSL RAM). This would allow my modem to try to use the line until its lim­it, instead of the fixed rate it has now. I can not get a high­er fixed rate (2 MBit down­stream), because the line is too long. My modem tells me that it could do a lot more (less than 8 MBit down­stream). I do not expect that the modem is able to ful­ly pre­dict what it can do when it is allowed to max-out the line, but I expect that it is more than the 2 MBit I have at the moment.

Yes­ter­day a tech­ni­cian of the line-provider I know told me that they are now allowed to switch lines to ADSL RAM (at least in my region). Great news. I direct­ly told he shall have a look if he can switch my line. It will be inter­est­ing to see what I am actu­al­ly able to push/pull over the line… and if/when the line will be switched (it will be done the offi­cial way by one of his colleagues).