The_Editor wrote:
Only problem I have had is when my "Frog" USB modem went "out of sync" (Whatever that means).
'Sync' is, quite simply, the term for having a DSL connection across the line. Basically, your phone line runs from your house to a 'DSLAM' ('DSL Access Multiplier') in the CO ('Central Office') or RT ('Remote Terminal,' a Central-Office-in-a-box sort of thing they can deploy by the roadside). The 'voice' frequencies on the line are filtered and split off to the regular switching equipment (that handles all the regular 'phone-line' stuff - providing dialtone, ringing, accepting your touch-tones to place a call and routing your voice signal to the party on the other end), and the DSLAM is basically a rack of DSL modems that bridge everything onto the telco's data network, where your packets zip around various other sorts of wire and fiber until they're routed to the rest of the Internet.
Since it's an always-on sort of link, either everything's "synched up" - the modem knows how to talk to the DSLAM, the DSLAM knows how to talk to the modem, and they can achieve this on a fairly constant basis without fail - or it isn't.
So when you "lose sync," it means something's gone bad with the connection between your modem and the DSLAM,* the little green light goes out, and you have to live in the real world again. :cry: Often it's a transient sort of thing - something happened to degrade the line quality below what's needed for the speed your link tries to run at, or some moron accidentally knocked your 'pair' (the two wires that make up your phone line) loose while installing someone else's service - but something frying in the modem would certainly cause it, too.
*Contrast this to, say, some idiot with a backhoe cutting the backbone fiber between your local CO and your provider's "peering center," the place where they connect their data network to those of other companies that make up the 'Internet.' The link between your modem and the DSLAM would be fine - you'd still "have sync" - but 'your Internet would be out' nonetheless. (Firstly because your packets just couldn't reach other networks; secondly because you rely on the DNS to turn '
www.amiga.org' into an address to connect to, and your provider's DNS servers need to check in with one of 13 authoritative servers stashed around the planet every once in a while, even if you just want to reach guy.next.door.connected.to.the.same.DSLAM.com!)
