sean's place

Update on Qwest 2

I called Qwest again and asked about getting my DSL circuit switched to ‘fast’ mode (as opposed to ‘interleaved’).

I’m not a DSL expert (although some consider my swinging of lingo to make me so), but in roughwords, the approximate difference between ‘fast’ and ‘interleave’ is that interleaving will split and recombine your outgoing packets among multiple ATM frames over the circuit. So, each outgoing frame really contains a bit of a few different packets. This lends itself well to reliability in that you can error-correct packet reconstitution if some frames are lost over the line. Unfortunately, this also adds a specific amount of latency (in my case, 32ms) for packets to transit the DSL circuit. A fast path circuit will simply just send out the packets whole over ATM, and if some are lost, they are resent.

After discussions with Qwest, I found out that my loop is only 459 feet long. The DSLAM is right around the block. Overall line conditions are good (actually, great). So, I politely asked them to consider changing the DSL circuit over to fast mode. After an email request to “the director”, an engineer, and a few days, they changed my line over.

[srees@relax]-~% traceroute www.seanrees.com
traceroute to www.seanrees.com (208.113.147.159), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets
 1  gateway (207.189.199.209)  0.694 ms  0.537 ms  0.464 ms
 2  everest.peakpeak.com (207.189.206.2)  21.475 ms  21.084 ms  21.483 ms

21 milliseconds. A far cry from the 50ms I was seeing before. Much better. (note, I have a 3rd party ISP with Qwest).

If you have given up hope of getting Qwest to do the same for you, hold out hope. It can be done.