What is interleaving ?

[old Bill]

Hi,
  I have various people talk about interleaving. Can anyone tell me what it is, and how it effects your line ?How can you tell if you have it on your line ?

Many Thanks
OB

[maxping]

Interleaving in data transmission
Today, interleaving is mainly used in digital data transmission technology, to protect the transmission against burst errors. These errors overwrite a lot of bits in a row, but seldom occur. Interleaving is used to solve this problem. All data is transmitted with some control bits (independently from the interleaving), such as error correction bits, that enable the channel decoder to correct a certain number of altered bits. If a burst error occurs, and more than this number of bits is altered, the codeword cannot be correctly decoded. So the bits of a number of codewords are interleaved and then transmitted. That way, a burst error affects only a correctable number of bits in each codeword, so the decoder can decode the codewords correctly.

If you have a router you can look through the settings,  its under ADSL STATUS in my router , it will say either Fast or Interleaved.

To be honest unless you are a gamer or are getting really high pings i would not bother about it , it only adds approx 20ms and would not effect someone who only uses a pc for general surfing e.t.c.