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DSL or Cable? Need unbiased info on difference

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The entire argument is a bit pointless now that AT&T has capped their lines at 1.5Mbps as will Comcast and Roadrunner and Cox very soon if they haven't already. The next phase of cable service is tier pricing, meaning if you want faster service and you are in an area that can receive a faster speed you can pay more money to get the speed. They are just copying DSL.

I use to get 3Mbps on average at one location with Cable, then moved to another location a mile away and now get 1.2Mbps at top speed. That was before they capped the speed. Cable is very dependent on location, and it's not so much on the population of the area, but more often on the equipment in that area and how they decided to split the area up that's sharing that equipment.

A friend of mine lives three houses away from me, I get as I said 1.2 according to DSL reports, he gets 900kbps on the same DSL reports test. He is on different equipment. WE both have a dedecated line for Internet running into our homes, apart from our cable TV lines.

Having worked for Broadband for two years all I can suggest is get both at your location and decide, it's the only way there is to know which will be faster for you.

 
Also lets say you are hooked up to cable internet access. And you are running a windows 98 machine. Then you set up file sharing on your computer so that you can share files with another computer than you have on the same hub. Then they are connected to cable. Now your neighbor does the same thing. But your neighbor in to a trusty guy and when he goes into network neighborhood he finds that he can access your files, so the deletes a bunch of them. All becuase you dont have a firewall. DSL is safer just becuase this cannont happen.

Huh? You are assuming that cable users are just part of a big hub without any kind of security whatsoever( it MAY have happened before in the primitive days of cable). Cable modems have to register their MAC address to the main office before they can be activated, each cable subscriber cannot just surf the neighborhood node and access another PC. ANY broadband connection would be vulnerable to any attack if there is no sort of firewall. It seems like you have have been reading too much DSL propaganda🙂
 
As stated before, it depends on your area. I've had both and DSL is faster. What clinched it for DSL was when the cable company wanted to gouge me for $50/month PER computer! That's why I have SATELLITE TV! Earthlink DSL lets me hook up to three PCs on the same account. Of course I guess some router or soemthing would work..not sure.

Ken
 
Depends. If you live is a crowded are, with lots of people per squared mile, then you should get DSL. Is there are lots of cable users around you, the modem can become a pain. It can drop to 36.6k, or somewhere around that.
With DSL you get about the same speed all the time. I use Earthlink DSL. I get 100kb/sec on a good day. 🙂
Usually around 85kb/sec.
 
Whatever you do, stay far far far far far far away from Charter Pipeline. At the moment, at least in my area, there is a class action file suit filed against them. I don't know why exactly, but I'm guessing it has something to do with getting 600ms pings about 12 hours of the day.

I live in East Tennessee and ATM I'm using Charter, until I get my DSL modem in about a week. Between about 2 PM to 2 AM every day, my ping starts suffering and my download speeds go as well. I've never received more than 2 mbps in my 2 years with Charter (which has always been flakey in Tennesse, Kentucky, and Georgia). Now for the past 8 weeks I've been running at a solid 52kbs-150kbps MAX DOWNSTREAM for half of the day. I've experienced the worst tech support in my life. Charter blames everything on ATT, but it is their choice to use ATT as their bandwidth provider. I finally get to talk to the local Admin for Charter, and he tells me to take a vacation from the Internet for awhile and they'll have it fixed within a month. Right now, if I want to play online games I use a local ISP for dial-up so I can get decent pings.

Anyway, I'm ranting, but I just want to warn you. If you use Charter Pipeline right now, I'd cancel it and pay for DSL. It may be slower, but if you get a good DSL provider you won't have daily outages and 12 hours of 56k bandwidth. Some people are happy with their cable, and more power to them, I'd probably continue to recommend cable if this had never happened. Before you do anything, ask people in your area (friends, coworkers, the guy on the street) how their cable/dsl connection is and who it is.

Oh and check DSLReports.com, they got some good info and lots of reviews for all ISPs across the nation.
 
RemyCanad: I never said anything about the security of cable service compared to DSL. I'm quite aware of the issues with using file sharing on cable. Hopefully XP's firewall which is enabled by default will help to stop any possible issues with that, however many people will just disable it when they find things like AIM and IRC file transfers not working, rather than configuring the filters properly.

On my cable, I've gotten as high as 2Mbps peak. Sustained transfer is almost always 1.4Mbps or higher. I'd never compare cable service to a T1. The upload cap on cable is killed by a T1. For a business that needs reliable high speed access, a T1 would be best. For a home user or a business that just needs mail service and occasional file transfer, cable or DSL are fine.

I don't see how having cable and DSL shared at the same point equates to cable being shared twice. The actual number of times it's shared isn't even relevant, what's relevant is how much bandwidth is shared at any point. Overall you would never be able to tell the difference between using cable or DSL if you weren't told, becaue variations in Internet traffic and user load on your service provider will cause slowdowns on both types of services. You can't simply say that DSL won't be slowed down when more users are on it.

RolyL: the way cable works is different than how DSL works with the Ethernet connection. At the cable node, you essentially become linked to a network hub, so your MAC address becomes open to view to anyone else on that node, just like it would be if you connected two computers to a hub in your house. So because you're basically then connected as an Ethernet network with everyone on the node, anybody else with file and printer sharing becomes visible to you and you to them (if you disable NetBIOS or configure IPX and don't link sharing to TCP/IP but to IPX, then it becomes somewhat secured). Either way, your IP connection will always be vulnerable, but file sharing is just one more way of being vulnerable.

kjacobs: You're applying your situation as if it were applicable in all cases. It's not. Not all areas have DSL that's faster or cable that's slower. Not all areas have a cable company that tries to gouge you on services. I believe that legally they can't disallow you from hooking up multiple computers, just like they can't legally stop you from connecting multiple TV's to your cable service. However they CAN only allow you to have one IP address, since that's separate from the physical cable service, and they can charge as much as they want for the second IP. Legally they can't stop you from using a home router to have multiple machines connected, since there's still only one machine directly connected to the cable. However they can refuse to provide support for anything other than a single computer connected.

RanDum72: yes, cable modems do have to have the MAC registered, however not all service providers require that your computer's MAC be registered. Either way, your MAC still becomes a part of a node's ARP table on the cable head-end so that it can match your MAC with your IP. Essentially this makes your computer part of a LAN encompassing everything else on that node. (I've logged into a Cisco 12000 series router on a cable network and in seconds found the IP and MAC of someone.) Have you anything showing that the way it works has changed so that any of that is protected?
 
(I've logged into a Cisco 12000 series router on a cable network and in seconds found the IP and MAC of someone

Really? What ISP? Anyway, my point is anybody with a broadband connection, regardless of DSL or cable, would be foolish not to have a firewall of some sort.
 
DSL was available before cable in my area, and I'd heard the whole "shared bandwidth" gripe about cable, so I went ahead and got DSL. I'm 4000 feet from the CO, so I qualified for up to 1500kbps... if I were willing to pay something like $89 a month. For $49/month I signed up for 768k downstream ADSL (I think upstream was 384). After a 56k modem this seemed fantastic.

Over the year and a half I had DSL, the speeds kept dropping. My DSL ISP was bought out by another ISP, and they in turn were bought out by a big national company, and by the end I was hovering around 300kbps. Then Rhythms went under and I got the "sorry, we can no longer provide service to you" email that released me from my 2-year contract---- woohoo!!

Since RoadRunner was available by then, I called Time Warner and was up and running in a few days. I'm getting 1.5-2Mbit speeds consistently, and that's in a neighborhood that could reasonably be expected to have a lot of cable subscribers sharing the bandwidth. (Urban area, yuppie haven.) There's one company involved in my connection now instead of three (telco + Rhythms + ISP) with DSL. The news servers are excellent. I'm much happier with cable.
 
Here's the cable vs. dsl in my area (Southern California).

With DSL, Verizon's uptime has been quite good. My pings are stable while gaming, while their line is more than 80% of what I pay for (they only guarantee 80%). I'm very pleased with the selection of ISPs in the area, so I can get my static IP, instead of their DHCP IP.

With cable, its through Adelphia. When I had it (over a year ago), it was BLAZING fast. I could download at over 220k/sec and it would still increase in speed (over 300k for some downloads wasn't uncommon). However, I would have ping spikes, at night when playing FPS games. These ping spikes would happen enough to make me leave the cable, but I still regret the downstream I could get at $40/month.

For download speeds, overall, cable speed could not be beat. For a really clean broadband line, DSL is better.

vash
 
Lord Evermore: Sorry about that, I didn't divide that up correctly. That was to someone else...

(Not directed towards any one in particular. 😛)

I am not saying that cable service is going to be killed by a large number of people on the service. Cable is inherently faster than DSL, and from there its the ISP's job to keep the speed up through the use of an adequately sized backbone.

What I was saying about them sharing twice is this.
Cable modem shares the bandwidth at the cable node. Then it travels to the backbone where it has to share the bandwidth once again. (Now I don't know why but could someone tell me why cable companies don't have problems with getting a adequate connection to the internet? Well I don't know if its a problem but, more like lack of caring on the DSL providers part, for not getting enough bandwith.)
DSL goes to the DSL hub, then to the backbone where it is shared again. (using DSL hub for lack of knowledge 🙂 )
So Cable and DSL both have to share at the backbone level. That's all that I am saying. So when it was said that DSL is shared, to me it is out of context. When people say that Cable is shared and DSL is not they are using the hypothetical idea that the ISP has the bandwidth to cover it.

Finally here is what I have got out of all this thread.

Comparisons.
DSL -You are connected to a 10base T switch, that is connected to a 1gigabit hub (used to indicate the sharing of the backbone) which is the backbone.
Cable - You are connected to a 100base TX hub, that is connected to the 1gigabit hub.

As long as you don't put to many people on that 100base TX hub it will be faster than the 10base T switch.
So as long as cable companies put up enough nodes, speeds will be good.

Oh and by the way, if I had the choice I would get cable. We have neither right now.

Also, in another town around here, the cable company is putting caps on the speeds. I believe someone already mentioned it. But they are capping it really short. Its like 128kbps.... So I don't even know if I wold get it once they release it here. (We have new digital lines and everything.)

Finally for the final time,the ISP I worked for is talking about putting a wireless setup here. It has a 19 or so mile range, and has a max speed of 5.5mbps. Has anyone heard of anything like that actually in use right now?
 
Your description is essentially pretty close to good.

Most cable providers cap download speed at 1.5Mbps and something like 128Kbps upload speed. This is what AT&T has started doing with new subscribers (including @Home migrations I believe). They're doing it because of the increase in users on the network, they're trying to make it so that nobody CAN get their bandwidth killed by other users flooding it out. Many cable subscribers get or used to get 3Mbps or higher. With increasing numbers of users, the only way to prevent everyone slowing down to near nothing is to limit everyone to a bit lower, that way you're more likely to get close to your max speed, rather than you getting no speed and somebody else getting massive speed.

The former Mediaone capped us at 1.5M/300Kbps (though it seems to be a soft cap since we do peak higher than that; the only reason I know the speeds for sure is I worked for Mediaone for 9 months). When AT&T bought them out they didn't change the caps, and don't seem to have changed them since the announcement that new subscribers will be capped lower. Who knows what will happen with AT&T trying to sell off the network.

Wireless service so far is mainly still in testing in major metro areas I think. Most of the issues with high speed wireless are the same issues as with 802.11x local wireless. Things like interference, security concerns. With some of the wireless solutions (if not most or all) you also need line of sight. And again you'll run into the same issues of sharing as DSL and cable, since once your signal hits the tower, it's got to have some amount of bandwidth back to the provider, which all the users will be hitting.
 
capping upload speed is what really bites 🙁 I would rather they not cap any upload at all, how is that slow other people down? I know dsl or cable have much higher upload then the 128kbit/256kbit that they capped out of paranoid reason. my upload is capped at 256kbit and all I could upload is 22k per sec which is very poor imo.

 
They probably cap off cable users so that they don't congest the node with more traffic and slow down the downloads. Also they probably do it so that you can't run a server from there service. It would also limit kazaa, morpheus and so on from congesting there network.
 
Cable is separated into upstream and downstream frequencies (from the viewpoint of the end user). The upstream frequency range (on the fat pipe after the sharing point) is MUCH smaller than downstream. This isn't a technical limit, they just chose to design it that way, because most users for normal internet traffic need more downstream than up. If people weren't running servers against the TOS of cable companies, or using file sharing apps, there'd be no need for more than a modem's worth of upstream bandwidth, just a bit needed for the HTTP or FTP requests for websites or downloading files.
 
Cable depends on your connection. Most of the time it's faster than DSL, but not quite as dependable.

I prefer cable because I have a decent connection. Try out cable first. If you have a good connection to your location, keep it. Otherwise, switch to DSL.

BTW, the thing about people near you using up your bandwidth on cable is mostly a thing of the past. That's not much of an issue these days.
 
I work for an ISP. 🙂

Oh OK,(slaps forehead)

I have TW-Roadrunner and pretty much everybody in the neighborhood had cable and no matter what time of day, speeds are always around 2000-1700 down and 400-360up. I have 5 computers at home alone and when friends come over LAN party (via my trusty Netgear 16-port switch), everybody can surf, play on-line and download at the same time and slowdowns are either unnoticeable or non-existent. I've had it for almost two years now and the only hiccup I could think of was almost a year ago when it went down for an hour ( turned out they were adding more capacity). This is the most reliable Internet connection I've had, ever.
 
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