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Broadcom’s VDSL board, at right, is designed to go at 25 Meg downstream and 3 Meg upstream. Most of the systems being deployed aren’t quite that fast - see examples below.

 

    The maximum speed you can get from DSL is dependent on several things: the distance from your provider’s connection (usually, a box called a DSLAM in the telephone company central office), the quality of the line itself, and the price you pay if your provider offers different speeds. Most of the internet, and most browsers, can’t run much above 600K, so speeds above that pay off mostly for shared offices.
    The actual speed you get is enormously affected also by the quality of your provider’s connection to the internet (routers, backbone). We expect to have more data about real world quality of service soon. Here are some typical numbers - all remarkably faster than the 56K of an analog modem.

Distance
 (feet)

Downstream (receive)

Upstream (send)

8000

7.1 meg

90k

8000

1.5 meg

1.5 meg

12000

1.5 meg

90k

12000

1 meg

1 meg

18000

640k

90k

18000

256k

256k

Unlimited

144k

144k

Your speed will differ. For example, most USB modems cannot deliver throughput over 3 meg of actual data, even if nominally rated at 6 or 7. Centillium believes they’ve solved that problem, as Laurie Falconer explains. Efforts are underway to standardize interfaces, but no standard for testing actual throughput has been agreed to.