The promise of a higher speed connection through cable modems, wireless, ISDN, and DSL has always been off in the future. That future has arrived for part of the Ames community in the form of US West offering DSL service to people within a nominal three-mile range of the West Ames substation at Lincoln Way and State streets. As with all new technologies, there are a number of factors to be weighed in determining if this one meets your needs.
Speed is one issue.
DSL runs at a number of different speeds, starting at 256K, which is four times faster than the fastest telephone modems in current use. Regular Web browsing and e-mail can be done at the lowest DSL speeds. If you are trying to run X Windows on remote computers, you will want to be connecting at higher speeds. This leads us to the second issue of cost. Technical considerations that enable or limit what one can do is still another issue.