Landaff residents, through no choice of our own, have been arriving a bit late to America’s residential broadband revolution. There is no cable in Landaff except for a few houses close to the Lisbon town line. There is no cell service in most of the town. And most of the town has only had phone company DSL since late in 2013 – and for many, even that is turtle-speed and prone to frequent clogs and outages.

Now there is something new on the horizon, but to bring it about Landaff residents have to want it enough to take action. This is a story with two twists! It starts like this.

Fairpoint has installed hardware that allows a new kind of hookup. It’s called ‘Bonded DSL’ because they take two phone lines and attach them both to a special router, and it about doubles whatever speed you already get. If one person streaming ‘La La Land’ used to choke off email for everybody else, this is the cure. 

This service has been available for a while at houses served by the Lisbon DSL box, but is quite new for those of us who get our DSL from the box near the Landaff cemetery.

The second phone line (which doesn’t carry voice) and equipment rental only add around eight dollars to your monthly bill. They have to send you a new giant router and a technician to install the service. We got it last week and it is MUCH faster and doesn’t seem to fog out the way our DSL did before.

So, if your current DSL is disappointing (or worse, if you’re on satellite or without Internet entirely) this is an excellent time to call Fairpoint at 866.984.2001 and ask for Bonded DSL.

TWIST NUMBER ONE!:  

If you are served by the cemetery DSL box, Fairpoint may tell you they can’t provide bonded DSL right now. This is because they installed that box with too few phone lines. Since bonded DSL uses two lines to each address, they will run out of lines very soon if they haven’t already.  

But! If you want this service, you should call and ask for it anyway, and ask your neighbors to call too. Because if Fairpoint has a dozen or more customers standing in line to get bonded Internet, they may be motivated to install upgraded equipment in the Landaff box, possibly within the calendar year. And here’s where it gets juicy:

TWIST NUMBER TWO!!:

The equipment they use to upgrade community DSL boxes uses a new technology called VDSL.  Two cool things about VDSL:

1) VDSL just about doubles Internet speeds compared to regular or bonded DSL – whatever your DSL speed was before, VDSL will pump it up.  And,

2) Every Bonded DSL router from Fairpoint is already equipped to use VDSL. So if you have Bonded DSL and they put VDSL in the box, a big speed increase will be automatic. That’s what the tech guy told me.

So! Let’s make this happen, folks.  If you’re interested in faster more reliable Internet, call Fairpoint and order Bonded DSL, and ask to be on a waiting list if they say no. Encourage your neighbors to do the same. If there are enough of us, we may be able to leap to a much improved system for the town. 

Note: remember we’re dealing with Fairpoint. Our DSL installer used to be part of a crew of three; Fairpoint laid the other two guys off, so we have just one guy handling a territory from Warren to Bethlehem. Some delays may result. But our patience could be rewarded!