For those of you who were waiting with baited breath to know how my AT&T FastAccess DSL was working for me (you remember, the $10/month plan?), I have been slack in updating you.
In short, it works great. Not fast enough to replace my cable modem, however, not with 768Kbps down and 128Kbps up. It wasn’t more than an hour or two before Kelly was complaining about the slow connection.
Even so, I found a good use for the bandwidth: music streaming! I’ve fired up MPD and am piping it to an external icecast server. The little link is supporting both the outgoing and incoming streams and handling it just fine. I figure AT&T wasn’t anticipating pushing a lot of bits on these $10 DSL links so I’m happy to get the most out of mine since I obviously love the company so much. After these tests, I may upgrade my streaming setup to the GPL’d radio automation package, Campcaster. That’s a post for another day, though.
My thoughts about AT&T aside, the DSL link has come in handy today. Time Warner Cable experienced a fiber cut here in North Raleigh which has left my Earthlink cable modem haplessly deaf since 11:30. If it wasn’t for my $10 DSL I’d have no way to blog at the moment.
So the bottom line is this: $10 DSL might not be especially speedy, but it sure provides some cheap insurance in case your primary Internet connection falls victim to a backhoe.