A brief screencast showing how to change  your ADSL routers ADSL account settings.

Many ADSL users are surprised that when they trying and upload something via their ADSL connection, that their download speed seems to drop to nothing. User's are under that impression that if the upload speed is 4Mbps and the download is 512Kbps then you should be able to upload and download at those speed simultaneously.

What is ADSL?

ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line) is a technology for transmitting digital information at a high bandwidth on existing phone lines to homes and businesses. Unlike regular dialup phone service, ADSL provides continously-available, "always on" connection.

What do you need to get connected?

Some of the terminology or jargon one often hears when talking about broadband solutions is references to soft and hard caps. Usually this terminology only applies to Asynchronous Digital Subscriber Lines (ADSL).  Usually solutions that have a soft and a hard cap are what is called capped ADSL solutions. (For the difference between capped and uncapped ADSL see this blog post.)

As the term entails, a Local Only ADSL account gives users internet access to websites/ applications and networks that are hosted on servers located in South Africa only. Therefore it is important for would-be broadband consumers to know that if they purchase this type of account, they will not have access to websites hosted internationally.

Main advantages

ADSL broadband solutions come either as shaped or unshaped accounts. This obviously presents a poser to a broadband consumer, what is shaped or unshaped ADSL and which one is ideal for what purposes.

Shaped and unshaped ADSL are terms that are used to describe the manner in which the flow of information to a user's computer is prioritised

Shaped ADSL

As with any rapidly growing market the number of offerings in the broadband ADSL (Asynchronous Digital Subscriber Line) market has exploded with many different options now available. Its almost as bad as the mobile and banking market where consumers have so many options its hard to know if you  making the right choice.  It is usually possible though to break the numerous offering down into a small number of categories with most offering being slight variations on the central theme. This is true with ADSL as well. The four main categories of ADSL products you get are:

Many SME's first connect to the Internet with an inexpensive or cheap ADSL account or iBurst connection and for the first few months the benefits of 24 hours, always on Internet access far outweighs the minimal cost of the connection. Over time though businesses find that their bandwidth usage steadily grows. Before long the bandwidth that they originally had, starts to run out earlier and earlier during the month.

Many small businesses connect to the internet via cost-effecitve ADSL. Before ADSL, as a small business, there were very few options available to you other than to use dial-up. With ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line) it became feasible for SME's to link their networks to the Internet and take advantage of  its global reach and almost instantaneous communication via the Internet's killer-app namely email.

For some time now Local ADSL accounts with or without a modem have been available. What "local only" means is that you have no international bandwidth and can only reach sites and servers located in South Africa. Since local bandwidth is about 10 times cheaper than international bandwidth the accounts are much cheaper too.