When AT&T says their DSL service is "perfect for social networking", does this mean ...?

[Vindaloo99]

Is this their way of saying that customers are never happy with DSL for performance-sensitive uses like VPN or Skype on online meetings or whatever else? Have YOU used DSL for such performance-sensitive applications, and were you satisfied?

[DrDave]

DSL is the poor mans broadband period.

[Artemisc]

It's a function of the DSL speed. I have DSL with a local ISP. As I type this, my kid is downstairs playing WOW, my other kid and my wife are surfing, and I'm facebooking. No hangups anywhere. Although I'm unsure if WOW takes more bandwidth than a conference. Oh, I also use VPN often and it works fine also.

[Casey]

ATT and DSL suck. DSL is slow. ATT U-Verse is slow too. The only advantage ATT has over cable is their dvr box lets you record 4 shows at once. They will lie about their cost to get you to sign up as well.

[Black Angel]

This is just complete marketing BS.
Social networking is playing on Facebook and things like that. It's not performance intensive at all. QoS, Quality of Service, is a feature available on most mid to high end home routers. It takes a look at traffic on the network and heading out to the net and decides what's more important. To keep it simple most home devices allow you to mark traffic by a few levels of priority.

1. VPN,VOIP, gaming [Skype and other real time video communications] are usually marked priority or something similar (i.e. - things are NOT delay tolerant - if Skype is a second out of sync or your Xbox live game is, you end up with weird things happening that ruin the user experience)

2. HTTP/HTTPS [Facebook or answers.yahoo.com ] are usually marked bulk or low priority as they don't need to be instant (i.e. they're delay tolerant - if Facebook takes one second to reply to your computer not a biggie)