By Linda Taaffe

The wait for high-speed Internet access is over for most Los Altos neighborhoods. The setup of vaults in all areas that Pacific Bell targeted for Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) hookup are complete, a spokesman for SBC Internet Communications, the parent company of Pacific Bell, confirmed last week.

“We’ve met our goals. There are no more planned deployments in Los Altos,” Fletcher Cook said. “There isn’t an area that is beyond the (required) distance of 17,500 feet from a DSL housing facility.”

This doesn’t mean that every home will have DSL access, Cook added. Some telephone equipment, used as part of the telephone company infrastructure to provide better voice service, can interfere with the DSL signal. If a line has these conditions, it is not qualified to carry the DSL signal. Historically, approximately 60 percent to 65 percent of customers out of each central office qualify for the service, officials said.

A small number of households on Springer Road, Portland Avenue and the Miramonte Avenue-Covington Road area will remain without access due to economic constraints, Cook added. SBC is looking at alternative ways to provide them high-speed Internet access, including wireless service, but the company has no plans to provide them DSL access at this time, he said.

Under company policy, Cook was unable to publicly release the number of residents who have DSL access.

Project manager Tina Simms told the Los Altos City Council earlier this year that about half of Los Altos was already physically covered. She anticipated that Los Altos would have nearly 100 percent coverage when SBC completed setting up DSL vaults throughout the city by this fall.

Residents along Fallen Leaf Lane and other neighborhoods in south Los Altos who had remained without service until October confirmed that they had access, or were close to having service, last week. Others, tired of waiting for the service, said they got connected to satellite.

DSL is a service that enables customers to connect to the Internet or corporate networks at lightning-quick speeds while talking on the phone at the same time.

The availability of Pacific Bell’s DSL service is determined by the distance between a residence and the company’s central office. Customers must live within 17,500 feet, or about 3.3 miles, from the company’s DSL-equipped office in order to receive service at the connection speed advertised. The distance from the central office or gateway to a customer’s location is measured by the length of the telephone line facility, not street miles or air miles.

To learn whether you qualify for the service, call (866) SBC-YAHOO or logon to www.pacbell.com/dsl or SBC.yahoo.com.