About us

Last update: 4 Jan 99

How this site came to be

Our great wide adventure began innocently enough a little over a year ago, when one of our friends stumbled onto some information about this new high speed copper technology called DSL. We all went off and did some research on DSL and agreed that we had to look into it (because we all wanted it use it for internet connections to our homes).

One thing led to another, and soon we found that we could order the copper circuits that we needed for DSL from our ILEC using the LADS tariff. So we took the plunge and ordered 25 LADS lines going to various places, and an ADSL modem and DSLAM with the intent of bringing the lines up on DSL.

After a few months, the lines were installed and the DSL gear had arrived, and we started trying out the lines. To our shock we found that nothing worked! We tried 7 lines (a representative cross section) and only one worked (the shortest, at 3.5kft). As it happened, one of us was going to Networld+Interop in the following week. So we decided that we should gather as much data as we could on our wiring plan, and hit all the DSL vendors with it to see if they'd have any ideas what was going wrong. The vendors came back with a few ideas on what we might be doing wrong, and a number of them offered their products to us for evaluation. After our bad experience with our first set of DSL gear, we thought it would be good to look at the other products out there. We took the vendors up on their offers, and from those evaluation units our DSL trial was born.

The reason we have gone public with our results comes from our own frustration at not finding DSL testing and evaluation information on the net when we were in our time of need.

Who we are

All of the testing presented on this site has been collected, munged, munched and otherwise mangled mainly by two people: Dave Lacey and Mike Lutz

Mike is the one who convinced all of the vendors listed on this web site to loan us demo equipment for evaluation, and found the other contacts that helped us on our way to becoming a public trial. Mike continues to be the trial coerdinator and all around router configuration guy. In Mike's other life, he is a full time network administrator for a local computer manufacturer and a part time collage student.

Dave is the one that pulled all of our data together and turned it into something useful, and the one with enough guts and organisational skills to put on the talk at DSLCon. Dave is also the master of managing 100 things at once, and making sure they all happened on schedule. Dave continues to be the all around know-it-all and electronics guy. In Dave's other life he is a full time interventional radioloigist.

Because we both have full time lives outside of the DSL testing, we do our testing on weekends and weekday nights...

Our goals

The main focus of our trials has been and always will be to find the best DSL technology (or technologies) for our own DSL implementation. We have two secondary goals.

One is to shed some light on what this technology is really like. There is no question that deploying DSL is difficult, but it is by no means impossible. The computer press, in general, seems to alternate between the idea that anyone can implement DSL without thinking, and the idea that DSL is impossible or a dead technology. Hopefully, this site will help center the discussion a little bit.

The other is to try to give the DSL vendors feedback. Most of the big marketing claims by the vendors seem to be about how fast their gear can go. One of the CLEC presenters at DSLcon made the comment that, "[If] DSL can't reach a customer, it doesn't matter how fast it goes". Well, that's the boat we are in. A number of our links are long haul (15-22kft). At those distances, 256k is really fast. 10Mbps may be cool, but you can't go that fast through our internet connection anyway. Distance is what matters.

What we are interested in testing

Well... If it runs over copper, we are interested.

To narrow that down a bit though, we're primarily interested in DSL technologies that are long distance (17kft or more over mixed 24 and 26 gauge wire). Also, our testing is ethernet based, but we have experience with ATM and are more then happy to test ATM gear as long as we can borrow the means to break it down to 10Base-T or 100Base-T

How get ahold of us (And why you might want to)

Short answer? Send email to dsl@avalon.net.

If you want to directly contact Mike, he is at: milutz@avalon.net
If you want to directly contact Dave, he is at: dave@avalon.net

Are we looking for input, suggestions, criticisms? YES! Please let us know what you think of our testing. If you think you have an idea on a new test, or you think that you've found a new problem that you would like us to test, drop us a note! We can offer no guarantees that we will try out everything that is suggested, because of our time restrictions, but we will give it our best shot.