Bring Home High Speed Internet
Access With G.Lite
Page 2 ... by Jill B. Hart

Unfortunately, despite their advantages, DSL Internet access has some serious drawbacks. First, due to technical limitations it only works if you live within 2.8 miles of your phone company's central office or a switching facility.

Another problem is the diversity of ADSL interpretations. The ADSL set-up you buy from Bell South may not be compatible with the ADSL offered by Earthlink. If you move, or want to switch providers, you may be forced to spend hundreds of dollars for a new ADSL modem and other hardware. The modem alone may cost $300 or more.

That's where G.Lite comes in. G.Lite is an International Telecommunications Union (ITU)-sanctioned ADSL standard -- which means that everyone will implement it the same way. That, in turn, means G.Lite hardware can be mass produced and competition will push purchase costs lower. Already 3Com, Diamond Multimedia and other modem makers have agreed to support the standard.

Another problem with traditional ADSL is that it must be installed by a telephone technician. Of course, phone companies will charge extra for this service. Fortunately, this is another complication that is swept away by G.Lite. For most users, installing G.Lite will be as simple as installing a phone answering machine.

These benefits require some compromises, however. Instead of the 8 Mbps peak download rate for ADSL, the download speed of G.Lite tops out at 1.5 Mpbs. Uploads to the Internet also are slower than with traditional ADSL, at about 384 Kbps (kilobytes per second).

Even worse, while G.Lite service is gearing up, maximum download speeds may be limited to 384 or 640 Kbps. This limit will buy time for the phone companies and Internet backbone providers to upgrade the bandwidth of their infrastructure to support more high speed users.

G.Lite is also still subject to the DSL limitation that requires you to live near the telephone company central office or a switching facility.

G.Lite obviously isn't a perfect high speed solution. If you judge it strictly on the speed it offers, it's just an evolutionary step from today's modems. However, if you look at the long term potential of G.Lite and other ADSL technologies, you'll see that it's really a revolutionary first step into a different world -- a world where the Internet is always at your fingertips, and where download speeds grow exponentially as capacity expands and technology improves.

It's too early to tell for sure, but G.Lite could be the high speed Internet connection that home-based Internet users have been waiting for.

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