Can Cable Really Be Slower Than 56K?

Ralph Bearpark asks: "June's IEEE Software mag carries an article titled 'The Cable Modem Traffic Jam' that claims (amongst other things) that 'a 56K dial-up modem can at times be faster than a cable modem and access can be more reliable' due to neighborhood bandwidth hogs, billing system bottlenecks server overloads, and various other problems, many of which apparently also apply to xDSL."

"Now, I had been seriously considering upgrading to cable, but now I'm not so sure whether it will be worth the extra cash. What is your experience? Is broadband really slowing down?"

I'm working at a cable-modem connected computer which really does seem sometimes to lag behind good old 56K -- anyone out there have advice on avoiding The Great Slowdown?

Comments

Slashdot Broadband Mad Libs

[Anonymous Coward]

Apoogies to the other guy:

I have __________ (broadband tech) from _________ (company) and get _________ (speed) except between _________ (times) and/or from _______ (hosts). Therefore, _________ (broadband tech) is _______ (adjective) except for the tech support which is _______ (another adjective).

Seriously -- These posts say *nothing*. Broadband infrastructure varies wildly depending on the neighborhood, company, locale, local PUC, blah blah blah. Unless you are comparing the same company in the same zip code, your nice packaged conclusions don't merit the bits they are printed on.

Depends on your cable carrier

[Alan Shutko]

If you have a sucky carrier for any type of broadband, your speeds can be very low.

If you have a good carrier for any type of broadband, your speeds can be very high.

Now, as the article discusses, there are more things the cable company has to keep track of to keep your speed high than with DSL. OTOH, you can get much higher top speeds with cable modems than with DSL. On the lioptonline group (for people with Cablevision's Optimum Online cable modem service) we have people complaining when their local transfer rates dip to 300KB/s... which is higher than the top speed of any consumer DSL I've seen.

So what you need to do is talk to other people with the provider you're considering. See how their speeds have been, and whether the provider seems responsive. See if there are any mailing lists you can check out to see if people are unsatisfied. Check out both DSL and cable modems to see which are better in your area.

For me, when things have been working, I've never dipped to DSL speeds, let alone a 56Kb modem. And when things stop working, the cable company comes out and fixes it (although sometimes it takes a while to figure out what's wrong).

My exp.

[Judg3]

I've used and worked for several cable modem ISP's. RoadRunner, @Home, Adelphia Powerlink, and I find that on the slowest days, they are still faster then 56k. Maybe not by much, but faster none the less. The main problems I had was frequent disconnects. With Powerlink, I used to lose synch regularly, for sometimes hours at a time. Thats the frustrating part. With a dialup, if your connection slows or drops all together, you just dial back in and hope to connect to a diffrent modem. With Cable, if you lose connection, you cant do much besides unplug your modem and plug it back it. If you dont get synch badck, oh well, wait. Same goes for DSL, but I've noticed that DSL is a lot more stable then cable overall. And I think it has a lot to do with the fact that you KNOW the bandwidth of your DSL, and it's harder to overload then with cable. From what I've seen, cable companies basically add on customers till the lines drop, then get more lines. Rinse, repeat.

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I love these question headlines

[mikeage]

Can it: theoretically, yes. Is it: no. Seriously... I have cable at my parents house (ADSL here), and while I usually average between 50 - 65 K/s on the DSL, and 50 - 100 on cable... I've _never_ seen a website that wasn't slashdotted (or running off another 56K) download slower than about 15 K/sec. Same goes for FTP. It's true that broadband often transfers the bottleneck further upstream... but that just proves that having a bunch of pseudo-T1-capable line accessing a T1 is not a viable long term option