Does DSL Use My Landline?

DSL was introduced in 1989, and was originally intended for the transmission of the large data packages typical of videos. Telephone service providers soon began offering DSL service for faster access to the Internet than was possible from a telephone dial-up connection. Because they can transmit the data signals in a much broader band of frequencies than they can voice signals, there was no hindrance to using the existing telephone lines for both, provided the signals were split so they wouldn't interfere with each other. The splitting can be accomplished at the user's end or at the point of origination.

The proliferation of cell phones has made paying for a landline an unnecessary expense for many consumers. Those who keep a landline often have DSL service bundled along with it, and a further proliferation of inexpensive Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, options, which allow users to place phone calls over the Internet, has made the landline increasingly irrelevant. To accommodate the growing portion of the consumer telecommunications market that does not want to pay the monthly expense of a landline just to have DSL service, providers have started to offer naked DSL, using the phone line for dedicated DSL service.

Whether it is called naked, "dry loop" or unbundled, standalone DSL service uses the same wires as a traditional landline. You still need a phone jack in your house to receive the signal, although if you plug a telephone into the jack, you won't hear a dial tone. It's not that there isn't one, but that the frequencies the phone company uses to transmit DSL are out of the audible range of your hearing. There is no telephone number associated with a naked DSL line, and your computer still needs a modem to convert the data stream to digital information.

Although you need a telephone wire to get a DSL signal into your home, once it's there, you can route it through a wireless transmitter and receive it on any computer within range of the router. Wireless DSL routing, or Wi-Fi, is less secure than connecting directly to the router with a cable, though the router can be password-protected to limit its use. Moreover, cellular service providers offer wireless Internet access over their networks. To use mobile Internet, your computer must have an appropriate receiver and modem, which, if not built-in, comes in the form of a peripheral attachment, usually a card.