As many people are aware, DSL is currently not available in El Granada because we’re beyond DSL’s 15,500 or 18,000 foot limit from the Central Office (CO).  DSL is available in Montara and Moss Beach and in Half Moon Bay and at least part of Miramar.

Since Comcast cable Internet is still flaking out as it has been doing on and off for a couple of months and there’s no evidence that Comcast will ever find and fix the problem, I’m thinking of rattling cages in various places to try to get DSL in El Granada.  It would probably be useful for me to be armed with some idea of how many customers they might get by installing the necessary equipment in El Granada, since it’s a substantial investment for the phone company.  So I’m trying this poll.

(See this page http://www.iec.org/online/tutorials/adsl_dlc/topic04.html for a rather technical explanation of what’s involved.  Non-technical people can still get a feel from that page of the investment required.)

Have you looked at Coastside Net?  I have no idea what the range is, but I know they have an antenna on the Coastside Opportunity Center.

Do Montara and Moss Beach have a central office?

I can’t imagine that any wireless broadband can approach the performance of wired broadband, so, no, I haven’t checked with Coastside.net.  When I talked to Eric (?) at Coastside years ago, he said running servers is not allowed, which is yet another reason why I want DSL.  Also, I seem to recall that Eric said that their wireless service was iffy when buildings are in the way.

When I was investigating DSL a number of years ago a mid-level tech at PacBell told me that Moss Beach and Montara did not have a true phone switch—it’s just some sort of extension and the real switch is someplace like Los Altos.  He claimed that’s why most additional services such as voice mail and caller id weren’t available there when they were available in most other places at that time.  However, another knowledgeable Coastsider pooh-pooh’d that explanation.

Barry,

The AT&T “central office” for Montara, Moss Beach and El Granada is in Moss Beach at 740 Etheldore.

Leonard,
For security reasons, AT&T doesn’t talk about what kind of equiptment they have.  But, I would guess there are multiple small telephone central office exchanges there as well as DSL Digital Subscriber Line Access Modules and colocation facitlites for competitve service providers and wireless to landline.  Lots of technicians show up there through out the day.  None of the ones I’ve chatted with admitted to knowing the big picture.  Again, I think it is for security reasons.  Which is fine with me.  I don’t buy the rumor of an extension exchange from Los Altos of all places.

Comcast does not give you credit on your bill when your internet is down for hours and sometimes days. They say they will but they do not.

Coastside.net has a good product and it is wireless. I know people who have it and are happy. When they came to my house for the site inspection, we were not in the direct line of sight to the transmitter. There were trees in the way and that limits bandwidth. So I could not sign up with them.

So for now I am stuck with Comcast. Believe it or not, my system goes down almost every day. A few minutes here and there, sometimes for 1-2 hours. I work from home and I am on the computer all day and in conference calls so I need to be connected all of the time. This is a huge hassle for me and calling tech support is a waste of time.

I would highly support the move to DSL.

Sincerely,
GraceAnn

Gotta chime in here.  I’ve had my internet service thru Coastside.Net for over nine years now.  They’ve been fantastic.  The few outages and problems have been handled extremely well.  Where else can you call in and talk to a real, live, local, and knowlegable person who’s on top of the issue and working to fix it??

It costs a little more, but it’s worth it, to me, to get great service and support an excellent local business.  Plus, I haven’t had to change my email address for nine years!

Of all the companies I want to give more money to, Comcast is low on the list.

Although I’m not entirely happy with Comcast HSI, I wouldn’t necessarily dump it if DSL came to town. It would depend on performance. If Verizon would bring FIOS, that would be another story. From a bandwidth standpoint, coastside.net is not in the same league.

Comcast did give us credit for two weeks of service due to problems we had over the summer. Ultimately, though, it took a couple of months, many phone calls, a conversation with a supervisor, and a senior tech visit before our issues were completely resolved. Persistence paid off, but it shouldn’t have been so painful. Real competition would be a very good thing.

We are treated like the poor country cousins here on the Coastside, and even more so in El Granada. From no access to HDTV over the air or cable or VoIP, to lack of other good infrastructure services that almost everyone else in the Bay Area enjoys. PacBell/SBC/ATT/whatever has been promising that DSL is “coming soon” to this area for many years now.

I might consider getting DSL simply to have the ability to run a server. However, I would be hard pressed to give up the bandwidth I get with Comcast HSI—DSL simply can’t hold a candle to it. I typically average 5-6Mbps downstream and 650-700Kbps upstream. That’s at least 3x faster than any DSL I’ve ever seen in the best of circumstances.

That said, Comcast customer service is truly horrible, and I would certainly enjoy seeing a little competition. It is intensely frustrating that it is impossible to talk to anyone local when issues arise. The head-end goes out on a fairly regular basis, and Comcast tech support never knows what’s going on and wants to send a tech to my house to check out the modem.

I would love for coastside.net or someone else to provide a viable alternative. Please.

Brian Dantes
El Granada

One thing that I understand would help get DSL in El Granada is for everyone to call the phone company and ask to be put on the waiting list to be notified when it’s available.  I was told many years ago that when there are 200 people on that list, they’d probably install the necessary remote equipment here.  But for some reason, everyone would rather gripe about the unavailability but can’t be bothered getting on the list.  Every month or two I receive an automated notification that “we’ve checked, and we’re sorry but DSL is still not available for you.”  So I’m on their list.

As to “coming soon”, yeah, right.  Over the years, I’ve spent a lot of time on this, and my educated guess is that they don’t in fact have any date set for DSL in El Granada.  If it really was “coming soon”, they’d have a date for it.

Let’s hear it for “regulated” monopolies.

What really frosts me is that I knew of two installed DSLs in downtown El Granada (both companies have since moved and their DSLs have disappeared.)  I also got a PM from someone else in E.G. stating that they had DSL in E.G. a few years ago.

I’ve been on that same list since January 2005 (she said drumming her fingers…) Believe me, I don’t enjoy paying for the T1 line at over $600 per month to keep my business running! I was perfectly happy with my DSL service in San Mateo at $99 per month. It worked great, reliable, fast enough, and great service through Speakeasy, a Seattle company. That and my tomato garden are the ONLY things I miss. Living in EG is worth the inconvenience, but I’ll still rattle the phone company’s cage as often as I can!

This is a bit of “me too” as my experience mirrors some of the points mentioned, but I’ll add a few particulars about El Granada comcast internet…

It is fine when it is working, but starting last June it all too often was not working, at least at our house (neighbors didn’t notice any trouble). I pretty quickly started tracking the days on which it was significantly interrupted and over the course of the summer there were almost 30 of them. I also quickly learned the whole routine of calling the 800 number which gives you someone in Denver or Texas who has no idea what the local issues are, and then scheduling an appointment for a local technician who can only arrive days later at which point they call to say, “seems like everything’s working fine” which it is, at that moment, but we both know it’s going to go off again imminently. Very frustrating and basically pointless.

A personal visit to the local office was slightly more productive, but I also eventually wrote some letters to their CEO address that they provided. Amusingly, this is apparently called “executive escalation.” Or perhaps that was a reaction to my snide questions about not being sure what “comcastic” meant, but that I was pretty sure it wasn’t what we were experiencing here. (I couldn’t help myself as I kept thinking how the rather exorbitant amount I was paying kept fueling their omnipresent and factually incorrect ads!)

So I find it ridiculous that they can track the fact that my cable modem was down so much but it takes repeated phone calls, letters, and visits just to get a small token reimbursement and minimal effort to redress the problem. They agreed that one house might have fine service, the next house have these drops and no one offered any good explanation (upgrades here, upgrades there, lines down, is your modem plugged in??). After the personal visit to the local office they were kind enough to send a nearby technician over right away who went up to look at the lines overhead. He said there was nothing amiss, gave me a few new line splitters as party favors in case I wanted to crawl around under the house and look for old splitters to replace. I would have done it, too, if either of us had really thought it a promising direction.

Strangely since then (end of August) our internet has been working fine, but as you might guess from the above, I was and am ready to switch to any viable alternative.

I was hopeful at the coastwave prospects, but unfortunately we don’t have the necessary view to a tower for good reception.

Just thought I’d share the overall picture, the considerable effort it has taken to be a “squeaky wheel”, and whether or not it has really led anywhere. Maybe I’ll pursue further “executive escalation!”

Cheers,
Seth

Brian Dantes - 01 October 2006 08:21 AM

I typically average 5-6Mbps downstream and 650-700Kbps upstream. That’s at least 3x faster than any DSL I’ve ever seen in the best of circumstances.
Brian Dantes
El Granada

Hey Brian,

Your speeds are much faster than what I’m getting via Comcast in Montara—any advice on how I can get nearer to what you are experiencing?

—Darin

Darin -

Check out this URL. It’s what I use sometimes to approximate bandwidth. To the San Francisco PoP, I just got 5874kbps downstream and 704kbps upstream.

There is a 2nd tier of service for which you have to pay extra—it’s called the 8Mbps Service (although I’ve never gotten anywhere near that) or somesuch. Call up Comcast and make sure that you are signed up for the largest amount of bandwidth they offer. Beyond that, there’s probably not much you can do.

Brian

Hi Brain,

I’m getting 2973 and 253 from the SF server. Big difference!

How much extra is this “2nd Tier’ service?

—Darin

Darin Boville - 12 October 2006 07:08 AM

Hi Brian,

I’m getting 2973 and 253 from the SF server. Big difference!

How much extra is this “2nd Tier’ service?

—Darin

If I recall the 2nd tier added about $10-$15 a month to the cost—our bill doesn’t break it out. We only have Comcast HSI—no other services from Comcast, and our bill is about $70 out the door a month. If you have Comcast Cable, I think you can get the HSI service at about a 20% discount. Up until a couple of years ago, we were paying about $50 per month for the same service—so I was furious when they did such a huge leap. After enough ranting, I was finally able to get a customer retention supervisor to waive the increase for six months but that as they was that.

I have repeatedly asked over the years if I could have a static IP and run servers at any price—and the answer has always been no. When @Home still serviced our area, they had an @Work product which would allow static IPs and servers—but they didn’t offer it in our area for some bizarre reason.

It really does get old how bad the infrastructure is out here. I’m very sad to see little to no response on my other Town Hall infrastructure thread about HDTV.

Brian

Wait!  make that 4809 and 333 from the SF server—on the last test I was uploading a video via my wireless laptop (duh!). Still quite a bit short of what you are seeing…

Thanks!

By the way, I did read your HDTV post—I remember it being long and somewhat confusing (even for a guy who has an HDTV and knows a little about video…). I’ll have to look at it again—or maybe you might revise it to a digestible size?

Anyway, thanks for the heads up on the Comcast service—very useful.

—Darin

I like http://testmy.net for speed tests.  It may not have the cutesy animation graphics of the speakeasy site mentioned, but it gives you information regarding where your speed falls in relation to others from the same provider.  Also, it doesn’t require flash…

I just ran the speakeasy test and got 6195 down and 361 up.  Testmy.net says 6056 kbs down, which is likely within the “experimental error” range, although I think they actually use different concepts for the speed—something to do with counting or not counting certain overhead bits.  When the network is working, my downstream is pretty consistant in the 6 mbps area.

Unless you desperately need maximum speed, I wouldn’t spend the additional money to go to the 8 mbps service.  First of all, you may have a network problem somewhere nearby and the higher tier service may not get you any increase at all.

I’ve reluctantly come to the conclusion that the firmware running in some/many/most of the cable modems is dain-bramaged.  When certain network problems occur, the modem spirals downward and doesn’t recover on its own.  That’s why the central support Stepfords always tell you to reboot the modem first.  I recently got them to exchange my modem (old was RCA, new is Motorola), and my situation seems much improved.  For a period after the exchange, I could see the network going into the dumper, but my new modem was much more tolerant and much more likely to recover on its own than the old one.

You might want to try rebooting the cable modem to see if your downstream speed changes.  If you have a hardware router/firewall, you’ll probably want to reboot it after the cable modem is back up.

Some people with unpatched and/or unprotected Winblows systems may have virii/trojans/worms/other malware running using bandwidth.  Just for the heck of it, stop all known internet activity and see if the cable modem activity lights slow to nearly nothing.

There is no level of cable internet service where they will ever allow you to run servers.  (That’s the other reason I want DSL.)  The broadband cable network is quite assymetrical and the upstream bandwidth just isn’t there.  One person running a server could tank the network for hundreds of customers.  This is not arbitrary on their part, it’s stupid/cheapskate infrastructure design.  I’m still trying to understand why there is so little upstream bandwidth, but the fact is that’s the way it is.  That’s why they limit everyone’s upstream speed.  This is also why you can’t get a static IP—to make it more difficult to run servers.

Brian—I’ve seen ads/commercials recently for DSL at 6 mbps at some very low rates.  I wonder if those are teaser rates.  Of course, you probably have to be within spitting distance of the cable plant to get that speed.

Can we skip the DSL and just get fiber to the house?

You’re getting even better rates than I am, Leonard. Much better. Where are you? testmy.net measured my downstream at 4800-4900 Kbps everytime—but speakeasy measured it at 5800+ Kbps everytime. Quite a disparity in my case. Don’t know what to make of that.

But the upstream bandwidth cap is completely artificial—at least in El Granada. Back in 1999-2000, when the local cable provider was still around before being bought out now several times over—they were offering *symmetric* 1-2Mbps upstream and downstream. So the infrastructure is there for at least T1 speeds upstream—which would be fine for most servers.

DSL over T1 speeds is news to me. Maybe the technology has gotten a lot better? But even if it has—somehow the chances of our local telcos making anything that nice available to us seems remote. No pun intended.

Brian

I’m in the corner of El Granada close to Coral Reef & SR 1.

I think that testmy.net reports usable bits/bytes and others report raw bits/bytes.

While the cable internet network is physically capable of letting you have high upstream speed, they can’t allow it because it negatively affects everyone else in the area due to the much lower total capacity of the upstream infrastructure.

There are probably multiple ways that we could get DSL in El Granada.  They could install a remote DSLAM.  (This is the most common solution.)  They could install some other equipment (I don’t know what it’s called) in El Granada, connect it to the very high speed fiber that runs along SR 1 which was installed nearly a decade ago, and move everyone in El Granada from the direct-to-HMB copper to a much shorter copper link to the new fiber-connected box.

All of this costs money and because there are so few people actually on the official DSL waiting list, they don’t see the ROI for doing it.  That’s why I keep bugging everyone to call and get on the official waiting list for DSL.

I wish a lot more people would vote in my poll.  The results up to now are encouraging for a company considering investing in DSL for El Granada, but the sample size is too small to base a business decision.