ADSL RAM … final­ly aban­doned (but with good news)

As I already wrote, the­o­ret­i­cal­ly ADSL RAM is avail­able at my place. The analy­sis of the sit­u­a­tion revealed first that the ISP side of my line uses out­dat­ed hard­ware. After the tech­ni­cian I know unof­fi­cial­ly took care about it (remote­ly switch­ing me to a dif­fer­ent port), I have seen an imme­di­ate improve­ment of the sig­nal to noise ratio. It is about 20 dB better.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly this was not enough to be able to switch to the rate adap­tive mode. Accord­ing to their data­base the line length allows to give me 1.5 MBit. My line is run­ning already at 2 MBit and my ADSL modem tells me it could do 8 MBit, so I dis­agree a bit with their database.

As the tech­ni­cian agrees with me, the next step would be to tem­po­rary move my house by some hun­dred meters towards the ISP end­point of the line, unfor­tu­nate­ly the high­er man­age­ment seems to be hav­ing some busi­ness ideas with our region (FTTT, Fiber To The Town (which means we will prob­a­bly get 16 MBit via ADSL) … but maybe even FTTH), so they are now mon­i­tor­ing the data­base for such changes since a while.

I have the impres­sion they seem to pre­vent such changes to the data­base because they think that if peo­ple get 2 MBit (instead of noth­ing, large parts of a town near­by does not even have the slow­est ADSL con­nec­tion) or 8 MBit (instead of 2 MBit), they are not inter­est­ed in get­ting FTTH (or 16 MBit). Togeth­er with their IPTV ini­tia­tive I do not real­ly under­stand it. To get their IPTV, you need to have at least a 8 MBit line. With 8 MBit you can only cov­er one TV at SD res­o­lu­tion (at least with their IPTV offer), if you want HD res­o­lu­tion, you need to switch to their VDSL stuff (which is not avail­able in our town). What peo­ple are doing cur­rent­ly is to switch to a cable provider where they can get about 32 MBit (I do not switch, switch­ing is a risky action here, I rather stay with a slow con­nec­tion that to have no con­nec­tion at all for some months). With 32 MBit (and TV) peo­ple have less a need to switch to fiber (and pay 150 EUR for the work to get fiber into the house) than with 2 MBit or nothing.

The final out­come is, that the tech­ni­cian I know does not want to ask some­one to play with the data­base to move my house tem­po­rary (which I can under­stand). The good part of those news is, that I may get more than 8 MBit in the not so dis­tant future (the cur­rent plan­ning is to fin­ish the FTTT work until autumn).