If Verzion controls the phone lines and DSL equipment how would switching DSL providers work?

[LordJezo]

Everything goes through he Verzion boxes, right? They control all of the data flow of DSL since it goes over their phone lines.. so, how would switching DSL providers make any difference in speed and lag since it all gets routed through them anyway?

 

[JackMDS]

By law Verizon has to give access to other providers (for a fee).

When something goes wrong the ?Other? provider has to ask Verizon to fix it. Verizon usually ?acts out? and it might take a while to get the service back.

 

[MysticLlama]

Switching providers can help when the bottleneck is between the ISP and the Internet.

Most providers generally oversubscribe their connection to some extent. i.e. they sell 100mb of DSL access to customers (100 1mb lines or 200 512k lines, etc.) and then they run it all through a 45mb pipe or something similar to the Internet, knowing that everyone won't use their connection at the same time.

If anything happens with that pipe or if all the subscribers want to get on at once, it can affect speeds dramatically.

Switching to a different provider gives you a shot at getting someone that doesn't have their backend oversubscribed as much, though I wouldn't know how you could tell this well without switching and finding out the hard way.

If it's still hard to grasp, envision it as having a LAN party. You have 24 people over and plugged into a switch. They all have a 100mb link and can all talk to each other that fast, and can talk to your router that fast, but it only has a connection to the Internet at 256k so that's all they can get. DSL is the same sort of principal, you can connect to your provider at the full speed of your line, but if they don't have a big enough pipe (or if it's too saturated) you can only get what spare crumbs of bandwidth are available.

 

[martind1]

it depends on what you mean.

some providers jsut have better deals on the bandwidth. verizion usually only give 128k upload while another provider will give you 384k up (and maybe they uncap it. i am not sure if verizon usually/always caps upload).

that and of course price. AS mentioned other companies use the same lines for a fee. then they adjust their prices according to profit margin.

To find more DSL companies in yoru area go to dslreports.com to get reivews on them. I found a great one in my area (Cyberonic.com) that was cheaper than verizon and also had a guarentee of 384k up (instead of verizons 128k) which was uncapped as well (I got 500k plus easy). they only quoted me as 384k up because i was right on the edge of their service and could not guarentee me the 786k they usually did.

 

[Soybomb]

The others have given great explanations. In the simplest terms I can think of verizon provides the pipe, but other carriers may be able to fill it (bandwidth) better/cheaper than others. Just like dialup, you still go over your phone lines to connect, but the end-point is where the difference lies.

 

[bozo1]

Verizon runs everything from your house to the DSLAM at your local CO. At that point, your data enters their ATM cloud and is routed to your ISP of choice. As was mentioned, different ISP's have different amount of upstream bandwidth - some are oversubscribed, some not.