I found out yesterday that DSL is now available for the town I’m living in. I’ve been waiting for over 5 years for a broadband solution to become available to me. I’ve been using DirecPC, a one-way satellite, for over 3 years and I absolutely hate it. It is, unfortunately, the only solution I had besides going back to dial-up, and that is even worse. DirecPC has this policy called Fair Access Policy (FAP) that limits downloads to around 250MB per 8 hours. Most PC game demos these days are equal or more than that limit. Then add on my love for listening to ambient internet radio station – Groove Salad (perfect when working), downloading movie trailers, songs I’ve purchased through iTunes, and surfing the internet, and that limit becomes too restricting. Once the limit has been hit, they throttle you to the exact same speeds as a 56k modem. It is absolutely outrageous.

With DSL, those limits will be gone, and so many doors will be open to me. I can finally play games online with no trouble, download game demos, movie trailers, music videos, MP3’s, and so on without any restrictions. The biggest boon is online gaming, which I miss a lot. I used to play Quake 2 online competitively, but then ISDN came around, then cable modems, and people with 15ms ping times had an unfair advantage over us with a 300ms ping time. The only online game I could play without being frustrated was MMORPG’s like Dark Age of Camelot or Asheron’s Call.

The only thing is that Alltel has to send out a technician to see if I fully qualify for DSL, and if I do, I’ll be dumping DirecPC without blinking an eyelash, and getting DSL. What a wonderful day that will be.