I live in a group house with three other people, and the telephone box outside the house is a mass of wires. The DSL software took a call to tech support to configure on Windows NT, but after about 15 minutes on the phone, all was well. Apart from a few dropped connections on the day of the installation, my DSL line has purred like a kitten. My line has a maximum throughput of 1.5 Mbits per second downstream and 348 kbits per second upstream. Being asymmetric DSL, the downstream and upstream rates differ.
Web pages appear almost instantaneously.
I recently downloaded a 17-megabyte file in a hair under two minutes. Video streams buffer in a matter of seconds at 600 to 700 kbits per second, and with the new RealPlayer, video plays full screen at near broadcast quality at 400 kbits per second. Recently, a friend asked what DVD I was watching on my computer. That's streaming video off of the Internet. Thin content Simply surfing web pages on a broadband connection is like driving an F1 car to the corner shop.