ADSL - Assymetric Digital Subscriber Line

ADSL - Assymetric Digital Subscriber Line
Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) is a technology that brings high bandwidth information to homes and small businesses over the existing 2 wire copper telephone lines. Since DSL works on the existing telephone infrastructure, DSL systems are considered a key means of opening the bottleneck in the of the existing telephone network, as telephone companies seek cost-effective ways of providing much higher speed to their customers. DSL is a technology that assumes digital data does not require change into analog form and back. This gives it two main advantages. Digital data is transmitted to your computer directly as digital data, and this allows the phone company to use a much wider bandwidth for transmitting it to you, thereby giving the user a huge boost in bandwidth compared to analog modems. Not only that, but DSL uses the existing phone line and in most cases does not require an additional phone line. The digital signal can be separated or filtered, so that some of the bandwidth can be used to transmit an analog signal so that normal telephone calls can be made while a computer is connected to the internet. This gives "always-on" Internet access and does not tie up the phone line. No more busy signals, no more dropped connections, and no more waiting for someone in the household to get off the phone.
Because analog transmission only uses a small portion of the available amount of information that could be transmitted over copper wires, the maximum amount of data that you can receive using ordinary modems is about 56 Kbps (thousands of bits per second). With ISDN you can receive up to 128 Kbps. This shows that the ability of your computer to receive information is constrained by the fact that the telephone company filters information that arrives as digital data, puts it into analog form for your telephone line, and requires your modem to change it back into digital. In other words, the analog transmission between your home or business and the phone company is a bandwidth bottleneck. DSL however offers users a choice of speeds ranging from 144 Kbps to 1.5Mbps. This is 2.5 times to 25 times faster than a standard 56 Kbps dial-up modem. This digital service can be used to deliver bandwidth intensive applications like streaming audio/video, online games, application programs, telephone calling, video conferencing and other high-bandwidth services.