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Cable Beats DSL For Average Speed
zymano writes "CNET article here says cable modems are 50 percent faster on average than DSL connections which I think most have suspected . There are some connection rates that i found interesting like Cablevision reportedly having the fastest connections, averaging 800kbps, or 13kbps above the industry average. Mentions other cable company speeds. TimeWarner cable was not tested."
Compare to power line speeds?
Most you can get on cable is 3gigs a month. Finally my ADSL plan is unlimited, hope its a reasonable speed.
--
On Slashdot I'm a lawyer.
Anyone who has had both will tell you cable is faster and personally I think its more reliable too. I've had COX, At&t and Comcast for cable providers they were all pretty good esp. COX, but that was when they gave static I.P's and no caps. I had verizon for DSL and suffered throught it for way to long.
Most people I know on DSL are capped at 1.5Mbps, while I routinely can download on my cablemodem at home at 350KB/sec. They're also usually capped at 128kbps upload, while mine (Adelphia Powerlink in Southern California) has been raised to 256kbps. The download speed difference has been around for as long as I've had a cablemodem under Adelphia (and Comcast before that) -- about five years.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
until everyone up your street gets cable because of this report and yer speed drops.... ;)
Acid House saves Souls
I think we can agree that in some cases DSL is faster than cable. I live in a two university town where there are a lot of students in my area. That means there are a lot of heavy bandwidth users in my area.
Since cable in our area has a shared backbone for neighbourhood segments, that means that cable in my area is a lot slower than DSL. With Kazaa running all the time on almost all of the machines, I end up getting a faster connection for a lower price.
... they _do_ regularly give >= 200KB/s download service, and 384kbps upload is fine for my home web server..
(yes, they haven't gotten silly with the port closure on my network.. Yet..)
That's nice.
Nonetheless, I think I'll just keep my 1.3Mbps down/800kbps up DSL link which DOESN'T require me to send things like say... POP3 authentication, or say... all the traffic coming in to my SMTP server in clear, sniffable text. The guy next door can have his cable, thank you very much.
Regardless of how "fast" cable is, it's not a viable option for anything more than casual use.
"Oh no... he found the
No body will be surprised nor should they. Cable is a much bigger pipe. If you really want fast connection, then upgrade to a higher package. Setting up all that infrastructure isn't easy and take a lot of hard work. Just try to order a T1 and see how long it takes for ATT, Pacbell, and Verizon to install it. If you manage to get a fully installed and stable T1 within 3 months you're lucky. Installing cable modems has gotten much better and is relatively quick. But maintaining it isn't.
No details on how laggy the connections are, the difference in speed is less likely to be noticed than say the difference between a ping of 10ms and 100ms in a FPS
Brocklesby Park Cricket Club
I often have problems with my cable modem. DSL isn't an option for several reasons:
A) I haven't had a phone line or paid for a land line in 5 years
B)Speed is truely a little slower
C)DSL is MUCH more expensive (at least for providers in my area)
D)It would be a large transfer investement to go to a different type of service - I have been able to do a lot of eBay selling and transfer of hardware as Charter has transition from @home (which was superior) to PipeLine.
The other gripe about cable not comparing to DSL is the misleading requirements. I had posted this in my journal before:
Charter Pipeline requirements
1)Workers / installers also make people think that is MEGABYTE AND KILOBYTE it is megabit and kilobit - they advertise the service with a k when it should be with a kbps or kb - but front desk people will often say "You should upgrade to the 1 megabyte service"
The way I have tested this is by hooking my Aiport BaseStation up to both - I used his (neighbor's) service, he used my service for a week. We both use Peer to Peer and both download a considerable amount of images and software updates. We also both upload to eBay a lot. There is a considerable sized class action action lawsuit in Greenville against Charter, this is one of the many things mentioned as a grievance in the suit.
2)They advertise on the Pipeline website that a Mac with a 601 PPC or higher is able to have the service. They install free ethernet cards (ISA,PCI, PCMCIA) in most every Wintel but won't install an AAUI adapter (on some Macs) or something like a PCMCIA card on the PowerBook 1400. They also tell my customers that I have sold 7300's (604e/180 processor) to, even if they have G3 upgrades that they won't even ALLOW then to get on Pipeline claiming it doesn't meet spec, when one can can view this message on their site: Pipeline Requirements [charter.com]
They also are under investigation for charging the bogus "line maintenance fee" - which they tell you if you don't have they will charge you to fix your cable, when technically (although not by law) they are a municipality/utility and must include line maintenance in costs.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
I value the quality of my connection above the speed. I know I can get a cable connection that is faster 'on average'. I still chose ADSL, which was more expensive too:
With ADSL I got a real IP address, not a dynamic one. The speed is more constant, so it's also fast when I'm surfing at 20:00, not only at times when I do not use it interactively. There's less downtime (less than 2 days over the past 2 years). And most importantly, to me was that the upspeed is much faster (256 vs 64 kbps). It's not all about downspeed.
the pun is mightier than the sword
DSL lets you pick your own ISP, so you can select one that's a bit friendlier to geeklike usage. That can easily be worth a 160 Kbps speed deficit. (Qwest offers 640d/256u)
Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
And I get about 1.5 mbps. I shit you not. And no, my cable modem is not "uncapped". This is just plain residential service.
Not that I'm complaining...
Those variations couldn't have anything to do with the fact that all three of those companies are selling different speeds of service? No, it has all to do with quality, not what is advertised!
Seriously, I think that whoever wrote that article had a serious case of USA-Today-itis, the urge to chart and compare things without any relevance.
Yes cable is faster, and sometimes a littel cheaper, but there is one little problem. If you want a dedicated IP address with most cable companies, you have to get their "business" connection. A dedicated IP is standard with my DSL provider.
It was me, I did it, I moved your cheese
What I have seen (NEPA, NW Ohio, and Minneapolis) DSL is more expensive and half the speed.
In NEPA DSL is 640/160k at $49.95/mo. Static IP over DHCP IIRC. In NW Ohio DSL is 768/128. It was around 49.95 the last time I had it (over 2 years ago) and it was Static IP. In Minneapolis (I cannot get it here in Burnsville) it's 640k w/a lot of download limits and it depends on ISP but around $55+/mo.
Cable OTOH was $49.95/mo in NW Ohio from Roadrunner. It was around 2000/384k. In Minneapolis we have ATTBI/Comcast at 1800/256 for 42.95 (it's going up though).
My IP on cable has been static, my connection is stable, and my speeds are great.
I would NEVER want DSL at the same price for 1/3 the speed.
It doesn't say in the article what they compared. Many (most?) cable companies offer one speed plan, whereas many (most?) DSL companies offer several speed plans.
Does the average include the hour or more daily during which my cable modem doesn't connect?
I have to agree Cable Modems are generally faster and also setup is usually faster and easier on a Cable Modem. My brother has DSL and had to wait 3 weeks to get his DSL gateway. I told him he could call Comcast up and be up with in 3-4 days. Only way it's longer is if they get a sudden rush, or you call on Friday to do it (if you call Thursday or Friday, you ain't getting it by Sunday! :) ). In addition, I have noticed in Comcast area's you can go buy the modem (if you so choose) and get up even faster. DSL Has always been a pain to setup for alot of folks (generally..YMMV).
Time Warner was not included......they are definitely not on the higher end although things do seem to be getting faster. I am seeing transfers in the 500 K range or higher more often then I used to but most of the time it's around 300 K (especially during prime time). Also, now that it's spring, it appears the recent storms are causing the cable network side some issues. I almost never lose cable, but I invariably loose my Cable Modem it seems. It's never been longer then a day. The shortest may be for a hour or so. In the Winter, it's damn reliable. I usually have ZERO problems in the winter and when I do lose connection it's almost always in the spring courtesy of a thunderstorm.
Gorkman
I don't know if cable suffer the same signal (hence bandwidth) degradation over distance that effects DSL.
When BT were rolling out ADSL services in the UK you had to be within 1.5km of the exchange's. The further you are away from the exchange you get less bandwidth. Again I'm unaware of the current limits.
Does any one know if cable suffers the same?
"Things that you own end up owning you" - Tyler Durden (via Diogenes of Sinope).
I live in Canada (Edmonton). Here we essentially have 2 major broadband providers for home users; Telus and Shaw (Rogers). While I can safely say friends routinely download at speeds excess 600KB/s at 3am, the tabels turn at 3pm (I still get my good old 140). I recently saw the SureWest Fiber drop DSL and I wish this was in Canada (10Mbps...for real too..and at the same price as I pay for DSL...).
Well, I can confirm that my Time Warner/RoadRunner connection gives me about 240KB/Sec (yes, that BYTES, not bits) which according to broadbandreports.com is much higher than most all broadband providers.
It annoys me every time I read an article like this. The actual title is "Cable beats DSL in speed race" where the speeds and reliability are entirely dependent on your area and services provider. For my area there's heavy cable saturation, and Comcast has horrible support, so I'd go DSL if it was even available. Better to ask people in your neighborhood about what highspeed they've got and/or visit dslreports.com to compare for your area, not rely on a empty article with barely any information. We don't even know when, or how they 'tested' - if they did at all!
I currently have both (company provided Cox cable for vpn, and DSL for my own access and running servers.)
What I've seen is that while the DSL is slower, it never goes down. In almost a year, I've not had a single time when I couldn't get to the internet. The cable, on the other hand, drops about once or twice a week now; though it's better than the 3 or 4 times a day that it was dropping during the conversion from RoadRunner to Cox.
It may have more to do with who is administrating the particular network segment you're on than the technology itself; but I have found Cox to be horribly unreliable, and their tech support people to be "less than knowledgeable" and difficult to deal with.
Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!
There are some of us who can't get more than 128K ISDN and pay per minute. I would just love to get DSL or Cable or anything faster which is always on. I really only want something to automatically collect email etc rather than having to dialup each time. Remember that most of the world is on 56K
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
Well, why not use Exim as your Mail Transfer Agent and transfer your POP3/SMTP/IMAP inside a SSL/TLS tunnel ?
I don't know how cable can get so slow... the minimal DSL here is 1bmbs, goes up to 4-5, and cable is around 5 too...
It doesnt matter that Cable is incrementally faster than DSL. (DSL already seems "instant" when I surf the web)
When you use a cable modem, you are stuck with a single provider for your internet access that you cannot leave without losing your internet access. If it wasn't for DSL, there would be no competition for the cable modem market. That means when their service starts to degrade (from the low point it is already at), you can do nothing about it but go without broadband.
They don't treat your internet access like a critical service, like electricity or telephone. If your electricity went out, the governement requires the electric company to get it back on asap. Its that critical. Now that companies like Vonage are providing phone service across broadband, internet access is going to be just as critical... however, under the Bush administration, I doubt there will be any additional demands on industry...
Last time I checked, speed is equal to distance divided to time. The corresponding computer term is called latency. Having tried a few adsl and cable providers, I have found latency on cable to be at most half that of adsl, thus making cable definitively faster than adsl.
Sure, my pr0n, .mp3's, .iso's, .rar's download slendidly over my cable modem. BTW, I get better than 800kbs on my Cox cable modem service.
;->
But alas, I'm here at work. I've resorted to burning CDRW's and bringing them into work, instead of just ftp'ing my booty over the wire. Thanks to the upstream limitation (not to mention, I'm doing this with a secure ftp client based on OpenSSH) it takes too long to see my latest Jenna J, or Tianna Kai
I'm just not quite there yet.
On the brighter side, I'm finding that most international music (.mp3)'s are ripped at lower sampling rates. I can get my fix of Samba without too much weight.
Anybody like "La Mosca Tse Tse"?
That all the FP Trolls are on cable?
Just remember that Cable could be described as an Ethernet Hub. Your connection is not dedicated. While ADSL is.
/. Doesn't have that much bandwith.
Ahh... what the hell. Just get me 25xT3's. Oops..
Damn right. Parallel Ports have more wires then firewire or USB, so my next external CD burner will be parallel for speed!
Once again, Slashdot has saved me time and money.
Thanks!
I'm not Seth.
Here in the Netherlands I know many people with (like me) 8MBIT/s (+-820kB/s) connections.. as well as 52kB/s upstream.
:D
And in several countries (Korea/Japan iirc) they're already at 12mbit/s
Oh, and it was really great to download the Matrix trailer through bittorrent with 820kB/s flat
I fail to see the validity of comparing services with different advertised rates. I have a 512kbps DSL line and I get 512kbps basically all the time. How could a 512kbps cable service be any faster? It couldn't.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
seems born out by my own experience. in the uk you're lucky to pick up a 1Mb DSL connection. most are 512. only in a few exchanges are you lucky enough to get higher (i'm in one of those areas fortunately - 2Mbps, reliably 240kb/sec sustained)
:)
however, 1Mb cable connections are pretty common. and as for belgium, wow. my parents have a 10Mbps cable connection - capped at 10Gb d/load, admittedly, which can hit sustained rates of 600-800kb/sec... "which is nice"
as with everything, there'a a lot of "incumbent inertia" at play. BT are by far the most dominant provider of broadband, they don't offer > 512kbps, so most people don't get offerd it. end of story...
I've had speeds that were simply impossible at some times (like immediately after a power failure) with my cable. Expect they happened, and I got them. Cable is consistently faster than anything else.
But my friend who lives 15 minutes away complains of his unreliable and slow connection that the same cable company can't seem to fix despite repeated efforts. He says this was explained as his distance from the major street in the area, which has the line running along it... which just happens to be the street I live on.
Cable can be much faster, or it can be much slower. It can be more reliable, or less. Helpful? No, not really. The only real advice I have for anyone is see which is cheaper, and try that first.
Welp, my Yahoo! Japan BB service, although I don't get the full 12 Mb/s theoretically possible, is more than fast enough for me. And it costs me about 3000 yen ($25 us) a month.
You lamers in the U.S. can suck on my bandwidth, biatches!
woot woot
(reply to self) Ihre --> Deine
I hear yah, and agree with you. Fuck shared bandwidth and fuck the security issues that goes along with it.
However, what kinda fucking moron uses pop? Why aren't you reading your shit with pine or mutt on the mail server?
I get 2.5 MB/s for an average adn I have seen it spike as high as 3.25 pretty regularly. I live in Maine and it has just come to my area this spring so I know that it will probably drop off some once more people get on the bandwagon, but at any rate it is much better than dialup.
This article describes the relations between cable and DSL in the US only. Worldwide it is a very different story, because of vast differences in quality of infrastructure.
I work for a DSL network provider in the Netherlands. We deliver DSL connectivity to ISP's, for them to sell to their customers. The fastest connections we deliver (constant bitrate) are 8192/1536 kbits for ADSL and 2300 kbit/s for SDSL lines. This is way faster than any cable provider can deliver, they usually top at 2048/1024 kbit/s. The consumer versions of the 8 MBit ADSL connection are usually quite affordable at something like $90 a month. Elsewhere in Europe the story is similar.
Cable has a higher theoretical top speed. It's typically capped higher than most DSL services, and is only slower if you're on a really busy circuit. DSL is about having a "guaranteed" fast connection, with Cable you don't get the guarantee -- it's variable because you're sharing the available bandwidth with other subscribers rather than having the line all to yourself -- but most of the time the performance is superior.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
.. but does it play Ogg Vorbis?
If you're running a server and need a static IP address, or multiple IP addresses, you need DSL (or ISDN, or a T-1, or *gasp* dedicated dialup -- don't ask.)
On the other hand, if what you want is the highest possible download speed for the lowest price (Kb per sec per dollar per month), cable is the way to go.
I know a few server-at-home geeks who actually have both DSL and cable: DSL for the static IPs for their servers, and cable for surfing. I'm thinking about going this way myself. The really interesting project will be setting up a dual-homed box to do intelligent routing of traffic across the DSL with the static IP and the (presumably faster) cable modem with the dynamic IP.
-Mark
I just got DSL like 2 weeks ago and I am still in shock at the speed. I live in a slightly rural area so cable doesn't run here and TbayTel just decided to hook up DSL. Even if I could get cable I am not sure that I would want it. The cable people have download limits of like 4 gigs, I estimate I have downloaded a little over 18 gigs since I got DSL so that is kind of out of the question :p
History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it - Sir Winston Churchill
I recently swtiched to optimum online powered by cablevision. I can attest that it is much faster than my old adsl service. I can d/l most linux iso's in under 30 minutes on a good server. Could't do that with adsl just wasn't fast enough.
The only thing I care about is if I am getting what I pay for, which I seem to get. I have the standard service here in the UK (512/256, although actual line speed is 10% higher) and I always get full up/download speeds. Yes I could buy a 1Mbit cable service (if there was cable in my area) and that would be faster, but that is comparing two completely different things, a 1Mb vs. a 512K service, the delivery method is a moot point.
I had Verizon (baby Bell) DSL and switched to Cablevision cable in the NYC metro area. I had to pay extra to get 1.5mbps for DSL. For cable, which is much cheaper here, there is no specified bandwidth limit. Without tweaking I now max out at about 750kB/s. One major difference is that tweaking network settings (packet sizes, etc) can greatly increase speed. But with DSL there's a much lower bandwidth limit. So now I pay less and get much better speed. That's why when I read the headline I first said, "Well, duh!"
Developers: We can use your help.
Cable modem providers typically
a) do not allow any kind of service to be running on your PC
b) are coming up with draconian "bandwidth hog" charges (for people who actually constantly ~use~ the full speed the ISP advertises)
c) get bogged down during peak hours
d) caps their upstream to 128kbps or 256kbps (all my friends on Charter, RR, and ATTBI report this cap)
e) are inherently insecure because someone can always circumvent the cable modem and snoop all the traffic on the subnet (neighborhood)
As opposed to DSL which typically
a) allows you to run any service you want
b) does not get bogged down when a lot of people on your block are getting online
c) does not hit you with "excessive usage" charges if you use your DSL service at full speed all the time
d) caps their upstream to the same speed as cable modems, and at 1.5mbps (at least for my PacBell connection) is as fast as the Cable modem service in *my* area
e) is far more secure because there's no way anyone on your block can snoop your internet traffic
SPEED is not everything. Freedom, security, and reliability of service also count. A Ford Pinto with a rocket engine is still a Ford Pinto.. except you die much faster.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I have dial-up. I get around 30-40Kbps. I can download a 10MB file in under an hour sometimes
Isn't 1.5Mbps faster than 350KB/sec? :)
-brain
Same story at MSNBC, as well.
Of course, solid DSL service is more reliable than cable, but it all depends on the provider and your location. For instance, a friend of mine and I live less than a mile apart. However, I am in one city, he is in another county. We both have Comcast Pro service (3.5Mbps/384kbps). My connection is much more consistent, since the infrastructure is different for each jurisdiction, even though we have the same service so close to each other.
Oh well, I miss the days when I got to test Sprint's 3Mbps/512kbps business DSL connection for free (I was a "consumer tester"). That was the BEST connection I have ever had since college.
The Comcast Pro service has been OK, except for when they disconnected my service because I don't subscribe to their overpriced crappy TV service. I wish cable providers were a bit more sensitive to people that prefer satellite over their monopolistic offerings. Luckily the Pro service has no difference in price like the standard service, which costs at least $10 more if you don't subscribe to TV.
In the end, though, 1.5 or even 3.5Mbps is simply not fast enough - somebody please put 100Mbps (BIDIRECTIONAL) in my house.
The first high speed company I went with was charter. They were ok for a while, but about 6 months into the service, they began to have problems with reliability, when it got to the point of having uptimes of around 5 minutes before dropping carrier, I switched to DSL. In my experience DSL is both faster (1.5 opposed to the 400 that charter was giving me) and more reliable (1 day of downtime in the last 6 months) and the dsl company (E) specifically told me that it was my line to do with as I please when I asked about things such as servers and VPNs. While the DSL is $10 more a month, it is definately an improvement (that and my company pays for the connection).
Saying that cable modems are 50% higher on average is meaningless if they are using a really bad measurement of average, or if the data is really skewed.
Does anyone know what average they are using?
~ kjrose
To me it seems existing telcos are milking the wiring of yesteryear. It's obviously cheaper for them to roll-out as well as being more ready-to-run for the user.
I ordered one of those special deal DSL services from a large telco. Down speed is rated to 768 kbps but I get about half that, maximum. The reason is likely old internal wiring in my apartment building. However, for the price of a service call (USD 100) I can have the wiring checked (read: hidden cost). No thanks -- I don't like the idea of paying 2 to 3 extra months' costs just for a <Dr.Evil> "wiring update" </Dr.Evil> for the telco as well as future renters.
I loved this statement "According to ComScore, competition for broadband services will continue to intensify, leading to pricing pressure and greater importance placed on performance."
Competition? Really? Like I have a choice of anything except Adelphia in my area. I'd gladly switch back to DSL if only they'd offer it.
if Cable was faster and cost less than DSL, or vice versa, the faster, cheaper one would totally own the market.
stuff |
because I'd love to have DSL again instead of cable. Time Warner provides my cable service now, and I have yet to see any of these fabled 3Mb/s downloads, or even anything even close. In fact, 1.5Mb/s is about as good as it ever gets. What I do see a lot of is that brick wall when I'm uploading. I guess I'm a little surprised that Time Warner wasn't included in this study, but I think they might bring those numbers down a little bit.
Speakeasy had a very comfortable TOS and a whole lot fewer customers than Time Warner, which made it pretty easy to get ahold of them on the few occassions that I needed to. When cable went out last month, Time Warner gave me the typical 11am-5pm window to stay at home so the cable guy could come check some things.
I suppose my point is that raw download speed isn't the only thing that matters in an ISP, and even if it was, I personally don't see the speed advantages they're referring to in this article.
I varies from place to place. I am in Ottawa, Canada. I used to have cable in my old place and Rogers (the cable company) overloaded their cable hubs so bad I was having up to *50%* packet loss and attrocious speeds in the afternoon (and it is capped at 2Mb/384k and the IP shifted every now and then). Then I moved (same town) and I got cable again but this time it was fine - no packet loss at all. In the mean time DSL became available in my neighbourhood and I swithched. My ISP sells me a 3Mb/600k DSL with a static IP line for about US $35/mo. Eat your heats out Americans :)
Actually most phone line systems are quite old and they have link coils installed to improve voice clarity, which is not good for DSL as the device works by filtering out high frequency which DSL uses for transmission. If your are has newer telephone lines and you are within 9000Kft of your phone company which has a high performace gateway 4-5Mbs is achievable.
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The availability of choice for ADSL is, to me, a big plus, but I don't understand why ADSL providers don't offer as much bandwidth as possible. I have Earthlink ADSL, and they have recently taken to advertising only 128kbps uplink speed vs. a previous 256. Comcast, on the other hand, recently increased uplink to 256 from 128. One of the baby bells apparently only offers something lame like 640/96. WHY??
Right now people reak the benifit of being the few on the block with a cable modem. Wait until more in the neighborhood go live, with nieve press like that its bound to happen anyhow.
C|Net says what, same as spencter says what.
Think if you had 2 computers in our house sharing a t1 line. Let you son fire up Kazaa and Morph, maybe NNTP download or two with Newsbin on one machine. Now you other machine just crawls along the net. Shared access just sucks, I know my DSL speed, and it not changing, and I'm not scared to tell my neighbors I have dsl like the cable users are.
I have the feeling that raw average speed isn't much more meaningful than raw processor CPU speed.
I'm not quite sure what the right technical name for this is, but although DSL is pretty fast in terms of data streaming speed during a download, it is pretty slow in terms of responding to individual file requests.
You can see this, for example, in web pages that are cluttered with dozens of small graphics files. The time for DSL to accept the request for a file, transmit it to the server, and start downloading the requested file is quite long. The result is that on such a web page, the time it takes to display the page is not much better for DSL than for a 56K modem.
I bless DSL whenever I'm downloading software, or a one-meg text file from Project Gutenberg. I love being able to tell searches to display a hundred or two hundred results instead of ten. And the stability and reliability of the connection are great.
But I curse it when I'm on some graphics-cluttered goofy corporate web page watching dozens of little "missing-image" markers blinking into little images. Each little image winks into place instantly instead of giving a fast little top-to-bottom paint, but I still have plenty of time to observe the details.
How does cable compare in THIS regard?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Here in Orlando, cable is way faster than dsl.. (at least for around $50/month worth of service).. my cable is 2mbit down and 360k up.. and I regularly get these rates, even during peak usage.
I was reasonably happy with my cable connection (Charter) - a few service problems, but nothing unbearable. Then I decided to get a satellite dish while keeping my cable modem. I was informed that I still had to pay for basic cable service (~$14 a month) even though I was not using it. Fortunately the phone company put a new CO just down the street so now I have a DSL connection, avg speed 1.2 mbps.
Just be thankful that you have broadband to begin with. I am from a rural farming area in Canada and the best that is available is 28.8 kbit via dialup. No ADSL. No cable (TV or internet.) (Un)Fortunately for me I am in Toronto on business and I have a 1.5 mbit rogers connection for a short time.
Stop complaining about how one broadband provider is 3% faster than another. Just be glad you have it to begin with.
(Oh, and I apologise to everyone I modded up. I had to say this.)
I am in Fairfax, VA with NO HS options, except
IDSL and I assume IDSN (which I can't really figure out the cost) These are really both
not cost effective, IDSL $90+ / month.
Heck I would even like a dedicated 128k up/down with a static for a decent price.
However one consideration that may be lacking from this analysis is how Comcast (and many DOCSIS providers) handle capping the connections.
On my Comcast cable modem, the cap is regulated by my local cable modem. So if I'm downloading from an extremely fast host, my connection will momentarily burst into the 3 megabit/second range. The cable modem will then halt all communications for the remainder of that second. So if you have a NAT situation going, and one of the machines is nailing the bandwidth, it will slow down the other machines in the house.
There's a more indepth discussion Here.
---
www.lonseidman.com
I'm on eastern Long Island (the Hamptons). SpeakEasy's NYC speedtest page just gave me 7280 down/919 up; 6492/919 for Boston. other tests give 3100/(nt) from San Antionio, 2400/(nt) from LA. All on a 10mb down, 1mb up theoretical. In the real world, I find sustained 800kBytes/sec is not uncommon from the Aleron SourceForge mirror.
"I use Optimum Online because it's STOOPID FAST!"
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
At the next election I intend to vote for any party that has a serious clue about the importance of internet bandwidth. Oh well, another pissed-off non-voter.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
While I've also found Cable faster on avg (quite abit in some cases), I also found DSL much more reliable. I've had DSL for the last 3 1/2 years. I had cable for the year before that, and my father still has cable to this very day. From what I've seen in the 4 1/2 years of both my DSL and year of cable and my fathers 3 years of cable is that he has 250% more trouble than I ever have. While I'm sure YMMV, generally this has been the case, even outside my family circle.
I've got Qwest's Megabit SDSL service running to my house. Even though it's a "Business" package, they don't care where they run it, as long as it's close enough to a POP to be able to qualify for the speed.
Unlimited usage, 8 STATIC IP addresses, they EXPECT you to run servers, and they don't care if you run NAT. Did I mention that it's a SYMMETRIC Megabit?
Now, granted, at $180/month, it's more expensive than the $50/month Cable and ADSL plans available in the area. (Metro Detroit, Michigan) But your upstream pipe is plenty wide to support serving multiple websites, and you can sell webspace and access to help defray the costs. Name-based virtual hosts are your friends.
Compared to a T1 line, which around here costs ~$700/month and gets you 1.5 megabit symmetric, and a subnet as big as you can justify to your ISP...
I'd say the people that have the luxury of shopping around (myself included) are quite lucky, as there are many that would kill to have either option! Being stuck with dial-up for awhile, I don't think I'll be worrying too much if I am getting .5Mbps or 2Mbps, so long as I'm not doing 40kpbs any more!
It may be a fruit salad comparison but the 6M/384K SBC ADSL connection I've had for about three years totally kills my neighbor's TimeWarner cable. It's more reliable too. (And rather more expensive, but I didn't notice that was part of the comparison.) The speed came up noticably when SBC extended their coverage area.
Water was recently determined to be wet.
Yeesh. What kind of "news" is this?
Hi, I'm editor timothy, you may remember me from other articles such as "The World is Round!" and "Fire is Proven to Be Hot!"
Here is a horribly written story. It claims the average cable modem user gets higher speed than a DSL user which is laughable. It makes no distinction between the different DSL packages: 640k and 1.5Mb. Cable really only has one package: 1.5Mb or on rare occasions, an unlimited bandwidth(up to 8Mb). So when they say the best average time for cable is 800Kb, that really shows you how poorly cable performs. An average of 468Kb for DSL is really not bad considering the majority of people have 640Kb. To get the 1.5 you have to be within 15,000 wire feet length of your central office. Any speed test i have ever run on my connection gets around 1.3Mb. My neighbor has a Comcast Cable modem, and apparently more of my neighbors do too as his speed goes from around 1.2Mb to 280Kb(LOL) on speed tests. The simple fact is, you can not beat the dedicated access of DSL. Cable lines are saturated with HDTV, Digital Cable, Analog Cable and shared Internet access.
Cable (on average) in my city beats DSL hands down. In my home its a 2:1 speed difference in favor of Cable, however I've been in homes where the opposite is true. Its misdirection to say any one solution is better than another all the time - even on average, I'm sure there are some areas of my own city where DSL flat out beats cable, but they are in the miniority.
The headline would be more accurate if it stated something like: Nationally, on average, using the following providers (list of providers), cable was faster than DSL in 15 out of 20 tests 99% of the time. But thats the kind of headline that doesn't get heavily moderated. As always, your mileage will vary.
the truth about the whole DSL vs Cable war is this, if your looking at broadband, and are unsure which way to go, dont go online on /. or any other source and read about it (sure its not a bad idea, but dont base your decision on it.) the only real way to tell which is best for you is to ask friends and neighbors in your area how their services compare, and pick the one that seems the best. not only that but make a few calls to the help desk's ask some questions, etc... pick the service your most satisfied with, because in reality, every service is different. the godlike 10Mb cable service from maine might only deliver a whoping 128k in New York. so its left yet again for the consumer to decide which is best!
Noone writes jokes in base 13!
What an utterly appalling waste of time! They talk about the speeds of these services using a single number, as if they offered symmetric capacities. Everyone knows that the common residential Internet services are asymmetric, with upload typically being one-half to one-tenth of the download. But they don't even talk about upload, which is where DSL stomps all over cable's ass.
Nor do they talk about terms of service, which is where DSL stomps all over what was left of cable's ass. Read a typical cable modem service ToS some time -- go on, I dare you! You can't run anything but Windows, you can't run NAT, you can't run services, you can't leave your computer on when you're not in front of it. Now read a DSL ToS for comparison.
But this "article" (more like propaganda from the cable companies) doesn't discuss any of that. They pretend that the only thing that matters is how fast you can download pr0n. And if that's what you want -- to sit in front of a mouse-driven boob tube and salivate over pictures all day long -- then sure, cable modem service is for you. Go knock yourself out.
On RoadRunner (yes, from Time Warner; DUN-DUN-DUUUUUN) in Minneapolis, I get 2Mbps! Or, I would, if my freeking roommates would close their file sharing programs. *sigh*
I looked at DSL before getting cable, as I really wanted to have VISI as my ISP, but the price difference is absurd. DSL is much, much more expensive for equivalent bandwidth.
who just switched to DSL, I will say that speed isn't everything.
Yeah, it's great to download something at 200...but when the cable company cuts your speed in half, it makes it impossible to download knoppix.
yea my next sports car is going to be a 18 wheeler with 4.5 times the number of wheels as the average car it'll haul ass. have pitty for all those por saps that got fiber it must be really slow since it has no wires
I've never noticed it before but my thinking cap does sort of resemble a hockey helmet
Down or slower than a dialup for a couple hours a day, port blocking and lack of static ip's. I would take the slower average if it were available. PS. They just raised my rate $10 a month.
Knowing that cable was faster I still made a conscious decision to switch to DSL. The main reason was not wanting to pay the cable company any more money. The secondary reason was their draconican terms of service. Third reason was I have options with picking a service provider. If I choose cable in my area I'm locked into Comcast.
I'm on fiber!!!!
charter could have been more honest about their networks being over loaded, but the service has improved the last 6 months since they upgraded their network. To be fair, other companies like COX, ATT, Pacbell and Verizon have been guilty of the same thing. When ever a company starts rolling out broad band access, their network gets over loaded until they can upgrade. That usually means 6 months to a year. So it's just a part of life.
Here (in the Czech Republic) we are actualy happy with anythning other than dial-up, but cable/dsl is very expensive. I think I would prefer cable, but it's not availible here. Until this February (A)DSL wasn't availible in the whole country, not only on particular streets/blocks. Cable is somewhat cheaper but is availible only in limited locations.
ADSL (what they call basic)
192/64 --- $45.9
320/128 -- $80.4
ADSL (standart)
256/64 --- $114.9
512/128 -- $204.5
1024/254-- $390.7
cable
128 / 96 --$37.2
320 / 96 --$51
192 / 128--$103
320 / 256--$206
The masses will switch to cable (shared) slowing its average speed to about 85% of DSL's. Okay, maybe not, but the potential is there.
"The best laid plans of mice and men gang oft agley..." - ROBERT BURNS
So many people say that DSL is more reliable, even if it does have slightly lower speeds. In my town (a large University town), DSL is just as expensive as cable. Unfortunately, you only get 768kbps download speeds with DSL. My cable connection gives me routine download speeds of 400kBps (roughly 3mbps). As for reliability, I've had fewer problems with my cable connection than friends who pay for business DSL connections (which cost about twice as much as my cable connection).
The article is talking about averages, so it shouldn't be surprising that there are a few cases where DSL is faster than cable.
In my area, I think more people get a solid 1.5Mbit ADSL connection than in other areas of the country. That's as fast as cable is around here, but DSL also gives you 256k upstream while the cable companies here (Atlanta) seem to only offer 128k upstream.
There are 2 reasons for the fast DSL speeds around Atlanta:
1) Bellsouth has installed many remote terminals, so even if you're 18,000 feet away from a CO, chances are you're much closer to a RT where the DSLAM actually is, so many people get much faster speeds than they expected to get.
2) Fiber to the Curb. It's all over the place here. The technology for allowing ADSL over a fiber connection is very new (less than 6 months in deployment, via proprietary equipment from Marconi) and essentially means your DSLAM is only as far away as the fiber pedestal in your front yard. In a house with new cat-5 wiring, that is basically as close to ideal lab conditions for ADSL that you can get. In some areas BellSouth had already deployed a different technology that had fiber with integrated data support (IFITL) that was basically ethernet straight into the house, no modem required. Between 3Mb and 4Mb download speeds for the lucky few that have it. That probably was not included in this survey though since it's neither DSL nor cable.
I'd say the biggest difference between DSL and Cable is that DSL is that DSL is a switched network, even though it is still shared bandwidth at some point. Cable is a broadcast network, your cablemodem just listens for the data intended for it.
DSL also seems to have lower and more consistent ping times, better for gaming. If you have a ton of cable modems on a node, the ping times should increase (I don't know by how much) because only one cablemodem on a node can transmit at a time. For uploads, the cablemodems are assigned timeslices during which they are allowed to transmit. It's probably on the order of milliseconds but it seems to me that's enough to affect ping times.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
The article says Cablevision's on top with an average of 800K. I routinely get from 4-5Mbps with upload consistently at 933kbps (according to DSL Reports. Everybody I know on Cablevision gets speeds in the megs. If the average is 800k, that would mean a lot of people are getting a fraction of that. $45-50/mo is a lot to pay for little more than ISDN-type bandwidth. I don't complain about my speeds or reliability, but I sure like to piss and moan about the soaking I get from Cablevision.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
It doesn't make sense why they would leave out BellSouth in the group of DSL providers. I have them, and a 1.5Mbps DSL service, which is way above the 800kbps cable max they mention in the story. Unless they meant 800kBps, then their study is complete crap.
So what's the deal?
Read a typical cable modem service ToS some time
I think you really need to look at the ToS for your particular provider. I am on the aforementioned Cablevision, and my ToS says nothing about NAT, or Windows only. It is also far faster for the money than other alternatives. On certain servers I see throughput of 10 Mbps.
I can't believe what's the use of displaying stock quotes on the cable modem test page! I can somehow understand the relevance of price / shop listings of hardware mentioned, but I would never buy shares by just seeing the firm's name mentioned in some irrelevant context.
What are we actually comparing here? While the speed in both cases could be i.e. 1 Mb/s, are we comparing that or the actual throughput of the connection?
:) and I got speeds around 500-800 KB/s. Still the speed the ISP promised was only 1 Mb. So does this mean that my old cable modem was faster than DSL?
The speed of my cable (525/256) has been steady for as long as I can remember giving me about 60 KB/s download speeds. I had, before I moved sometime ago, a cablemodem that was uncapped (the pro model as the ISP calls it
Most definately it was cheaper than a DSL of 1 Mb, but also the service level was much worse, and my ping was with the old modem terrible. The speed however made up for the lack of support and the bad level of service and it's outtages.
The bad thing with the old modem was that the bandwith was shared, which sometimes made my connection unusable with speeds below that of a dial-up connection. Was my modem then slower than a DSL?
How about comparing cable modems to LAN connections?
--
Tell me why I had to be a powerslave. I don't want to die, I'm a god, why can't I live on?
We've got two choices here were I live (near) Cincinnati, OH. Road runner (cable) and Zoomtown (DSL). I've got rr, which dl's at about ~250kB/s, and upstream at ~40kB/s, max 2 computers (I use NAT), you us get a real ip. My brother has Zoomtown, which dl's at ~80kB/s and upstream at ~40kB/s, max 4 computers, but they use NAT. We've got both, and both are $40/month. When they first started they were unstable as hell, and Zoomtown actually forced you to log in, but that has changed since then. Uptime is great with both services. From what I can tell on Slashdot, we're pretty lucky here.
And why don't you be thankful you even have electricity. There's a lot of people starving in the world and you're complaining about your Internet connection...
I had to say this.
I have RCN cable modem service just outside Boston. They just upgraded the service to 3 Mbps for downloads, not sure for uploads but that's pretty quick too. I've never had any trouble with outages either - the occasional problem (every 6 months or so) is quickly resolved and tech support is always friendly and helpful.
Heck, I like 'em so much they handle my local phone service and cable TV too. The service is a vast improvement over the old MediaOne cable modem service.
I've got Cox, and to get a hard IP I can run a server on, I have to shell out $69/month for a 128k symetrical link. (It's 3mbps down and 256k up at $40 for a DHCP account.) Not too speedy compared to what Speakeasy's shilling for the same price... but Verizon has not upgraded the local switch to DSL-capable, and probably never will.
While we're on the topic of Speakeasy, I once had a 780k symmetrical link from them for $80/month. They no longer offer anything anywhere near that speed/price ratio... they've taken a huge step back. Yet, as has been noted elsewhere, DSL in Japan is dirt cheap for a pipe that can saturate a 10b-T link on the downstream.
This is what deregulation gets you.
The "game over" is in the next generation wireless. Goodbye, cable! Goodbye, POTS! Sprint already offers 155k symetrical links for $50/month... uncapped and unmetered. All you can eat. The other big wireless vendors will either quickly follow suit, or get eaten alive by Sprint. If they can even get a reliable link at 1.5mbps at $50/month, they'll steal huge share away from DSL and Cable at twice that speed. Everyone with a notebook will want it. Unlike on copper, wireless RF sees no cost benefit from throttling upload, so I can see hard IPs and servers being the deal maker for premium "geek packages." Then the other broadband vendors will either shape up, or get run out of town on a rail.
SoupIsGood Food
In my neighborhood, in a college town, DSL is faster than cable 75% of the time. The only time my friends get decent data rates is from 2-8am. From 4-6pm, they often complain that their cable runs the same speed as a 56k modem
With my 768/128 DSL connection, I always get 80kbps and my connection has never gone down in the last 18 months.
I've had DSL for 5 years with different providers and my download speed was always way above 1100 (most of the time even above 1200). No matter what time of the day or what day of the week. Same for upload.
I just moved and for some reasons I don't have time to elaborate i was 'forced' to go with cable and choose RCN. Now I am paying more money for the same 'package' I had with DSL and my download speeds are anywhere from 450 to 1050 depending on the time of the day and which day of the week and the latency is very noticable for online gaming compared to DSL. Also RCN now officially doesn't allow to connect more than one pc (with a router) to the connection and being more expensive already also wants $9.50 for a static IP address that was included in my cheaper DSL package.
So for me, as soon as i will be able to, I will switch back to DSL. More reliable, better reliable speed, better latency, multiple pc support and cheaper.
Happy DSL customer / Unhappy Cable customer.
Interestingly, Time Warner appears to have spawned off or sold at least part of it's cable network. Locally it is now "Bright House" but in the Charlotte, NC area it is still TWC. I'm not sure how this will effect my bandwidth but so far I haven't noticed any change. Of course, at this point the only thing that has changed are the logos that are plastered on the trucks/buildings and the cable box's info guides.
Planetes
"One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promo Ad
"Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer" - Adolf Hitl
In Toronto, huh? Enjoy your high-speed internet connection while you can!
I live in a medium sized apartment complex (4 buildings with 24 1-4 BR Apts). Recently our local cable provider signed an exclusive contract with our landlord to offer cable TV and "high speed internet" (read: cable modem) to all of our residents. This wonderful addition was included in rent with no additional charge (yet.) The problem with this - the cable connection is slow as shite because every Tom, Dick and Harry (and their 9 kids) is using the connection!
I'm now seeing about 3 spam snail mails coming to my apartment advertising specials from the same company (That I suspect are canvasing the neighborhood around our apt complex) it's going to get even slower!
Are these cable companies shooting themselves in the foot by completely flooding their market? Both from a marketing perspective, and a ISP perspective, this is a BAD IDEA.
"One touch of Darwin makes the whole world kin." George Bernard Shaw
Here's a link to the original press release from ComScore:
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Fayetteville, North Carolina
Time Warner/"Roadrunner"
I've done testing in the past and more recently, and I think our area was upgraded in the past 3 months.
I used to cap out at around 1.5mbps with a 128kbps upstream.
Now, I can achieve over 2.0mbps and 384kbps upstream, which I think is amazing. I love it.
Of course, this all depends on what sites I am accessing. But the standard sites for game demo downloads, Microsoft (ConXion), etc., are all up near the 2mbps limit, which is very nice indeed.
A couple months ago (which in hindsight I believe was the upgrade period), we had frequent outages. One week we would have them for hours at a time. But in the past month, the cable hasn't gone "out" once, and I believe we had an upstream problem like once or twice (nothing would resolve, at least).
So, all in all I am very happy with the current state of my cable, although it was painful going through (what I presume to be) the upgrade process. Some feedback from the cable company would have been nice; ie, mass email to customers saying "Hey, we're upgrading your area."
It just so happens I was hunting around for broadband here in philadelphia and ended up signing up for DSL service. Our cable service is Comcast (which I believe is based in philadelphia). The main issue I had w/ Comcast was you had to buy their cable service or got the $5 tacked onto your bill + installation fees of $100 + box rental and of course the NAT issue. The standard "safe" DSL here is verizon (also my local phone company) which offers 768 down/128k up for ~50 a month or ~40 w/ a year contract. What I ended up signing up for was a company called digizip based in nyc. For $50 a month (or $45 w/ a year contract + their LD) you get 1.5mbit down/768 up + 5 static IP addresses + no installation fee etc etc. There is a company called "cyberonic" that seems to offer something pretty similar. Having "mad" upstream bandwidth at 768k and 5 static IP addresses pretty much did it for me (No port blocking, any # of machines etc). In any case I just ordered this, can't vouch for the reality of the situation but it seemed to me a better deal than cablemodems w/out any guarantee (but w/ typical download speeds pretty decent) and not having to "hide" my machines..
-avi
Two words- population density. Remember, Japan is a fraction of the size of the US; US providers have to deal with the expense of all the areas where population density is much, much less(except in very concentrated areas); the guys in the city may be cheap to wire up, but the guys out in the burbs cost a small fortune(and there's fewer of 'em.) You can't, for the most part, charge drastically different rates- the city people subsidize the suburbs.
Besides, a large percentage of the US is perfectly happy with dialup...
Please help metamoderate.
... except my DSL, which I pay $50/month for, gets 1.5Mb download and 38.4KB... yes, I get 155KB a second download speeds and it's obvious my provider, Earthlink, caps this-- it will get to 155KB very fast and then cap off and go no faster.
I also rarely deal with congestion, since my DSL is much less vulnerable to this problem. In other words, while I've seen a cable modem burst to 300KB, they rarely do better than 1/10th of that during peak usage.
Obviously, everyone here will have different results. For me, it seems my DSL is "above average."
"Politicians find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the people."
How about doing a study that would be useful for soemthing OTHER than downloading pr0n? Yes, Cable let's me download faster.. but how does the latency compare?
For interactive shells, or online games... bandwidth is meaningless. I have a cable modem with the usual 1.5Mbps downstream, 256Kbps upstream and while a download or two at 25Kbps isn't too noticable, even a trickle upload at 12Kbps seriously impacts latency, driving ping times up from an "idle" norm of 48ms to well over 100ms, with spikes in the 400's.
Given a choice, I'll always take lower latency in preference to higher bandwidth.
Roadrunner $40/month
DSL $30-40$/month (depending on service speed)
Having used the $40/month DSL for the past two months, and before that, using cable for three years. I can say with very good certainty that I haven't noticed a speed difference. What I have noticed though is that my DSL IP has remained unchanged since the first day I had it installed, TW cable on the other hand used to change my IP every two weeks or so. Another plus is the fact that I'm the only person in my development using DSL (heck, the phone company didn't even know if DSL would work in my area (West Henrietta)). When I had cable, I know that many of my neighbors also had it, so speed would suck throughout prime-time.
He's out looking for all the packets he dropped!
I live near Dulles. It's either Cox residential, or ISDN. Cox QOS is so bad I call them up just to harrass them now, becuase I know nothing will ever get fixed. Meanwhile, there's no DSL to be found. Furthermore, Cox won't offer "Business class" service here, which is stupid because the area is so flush with cash and techies and I would kill to get better QOS on cable.
In short: richest county in middle atlantic has no decent broadband. Something is seriously wrong in the county seat of AOL.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Cable might well outdo *DSL, but here in the UK, the basic DSL packages and Cable (Blueyonder) packages are similar in price And in Download speed. The advantage DSL has over Cable here, is that IIRC, Cable tends to have only a 33kbps upload speed, against DSL's 256. Only the the 1meg cable packages have 256kbps upload speeds, but they are almost twice as expensive as the 512/256 DSL packages. TBH, 512/256 dsl does all I need of it.
I serve webpagaes (in a dev environment so not monod traffic) do a bit of p2p, play counterstrike, and sometimes run a private shoutcast server and it does more than enough. The added advantage that ADSL here, runs on the back of my BT telephone line is a bonus.. no second lines needing installed.. I reckon ADSL is more flexible for serious home/geek use.
Oh, and although it's DHCP, I've had the same IP address for almost a year, despite the occasional router crash, dropped connection and just plain power-offs.
at the end of the day, a few kbps here or their is largely immaterial. Does it do what you want, when you want it.. that's what is important in my book.
a
When a passenger of the foot, hooves in sight, tootel the horn trumpet melodiously
As of Saturday when my DSLAM port gets set to a higher speed, I'll be synced at 3.5mbs/800kbs. All for USD$30-35. I suspect that makes it faster than most cable internet services. Oh, I'm in Toronto.
It's really distasteful to moyour own comments!
But they don't even talk about upload, which is where DSL stomps all over cable's ass.
To the majority of users upload is largely irrelevant. Having said that, you dismiss the report and then unilaterally and conclusively proclaim that "DSL stomps all over cable's ass" when it comes to upload. In my area my Cogeco@Home is capped at 50KB/second (and gets it constantly) while the competing ADSL is capped at 25KB/second. My downstream is capped at 3Mbps (300KB/second) while the competing ADSL is capped at from 500Kbps to 1Mbps. Works great for grabbing software, playing online multiplayer games (my PC only needs to upload the information for me, but needs to download the information for more than a dozen or more other players).
Nor do they talk about terms of service, which is where DSL stomps all over what was left of cable's ass.
Geez you're defensive about your use of DSL. Most DSL services are run by the same large, faceless, "greedy" enterprises as cable, and most share the same sort of legaleze and restrictions. Is there something fundamental about DSL that makes it this bastion of freedom that you proclaim? Bah.
And if that's what you want -- to sit in front of a mouse-driven boob tube and salivate over pictures all day long -- then sure, cable modem service is for you. Go knock yourself out.
How in the world did you get moderated anything other than troll? Clearly you disagree with the article, but your retort seems to be venom to the exact opposite pole (rather than finding a middle ground which is most other comments have. Along the lines of "It really varies based upon your provider and region").
What an utterly appalling waste of time! They talk about the speeds of these services using a single number, as if they offered symmetric capacities. Everyone knows that the common residential Internet services are asymmetric, with upload typically being one-half to one-tenth of the download. But they don't even talk about upload, which is where DSL stomps all over cable's ass.
Not entirely. My upload speed is capped at around 128 Kb/s, and (unless you pay extra) most basic DSL services have similar caps. DSL provides faster uploading on average most probably, but the difference isn't big enough for you to be justified in saying that "DSL stomps all over cable's ass."
Nor do they talk about terms of service, which is where DSL stomps all over what was left of cable's ass. Read a typical cable modem service ToS some time -- go on, I dare you! You can't run anything but Windows, you can't run NAT, you can't run services, you can't leave your computer on when you're not in front of it. Now read a DSL ToS for comparison.
The only real limitation I've run into in a cable ToS is the no hosting servers thing (which is not very strictly enforced, but that's another story). I'm using Adelphia Powerlink in the Pittsburgh area, and although when we first got the service over two years ago they were not very high on supporting non-Windows OSs and didn't allow NAT, they've gotten over it and now support my Mac just fine, and they don't care that I have a router. And of course I've always left all my computers on 24/7, so I don't know where you're coming from with that.
But this "article" (more like propaganda from the cable companies) doesn't discuss any of that. They pretend that the only thing that matters is how fast you can download pr0n. And if that's what you want -- to sit in front of a mouse-driven boob tube and salivate over pictures all day long -- then sure, cable modem service is for you. Go knock yourself out.
That one made me laugh. Mmhmm, faster download speeds are only useful for pr0n. It's not as if us cable modem users have anything better to do. Riiiiiiiiiight.
-- shayborg
This just in:
28.8 modems are 50% faster than 14.4 modems
Is this news? Do anyone take DSL heads/providers seriously?
Repeat after me: Cable is faster than DSL except for 5% of fringe cases which are located overloaded nodes maintained by slacker ISPs.
What are you talking about? A)DOCSIS 1.1 encrypts (3des) all traffic. 2) Your connection type has nothing to do with running an SSL POP/SMTP server... Maybe you just need to learn how to set up a mail Server.
I had a cable modem once(with @home through comcast). I could download at 500 *KB* per second for a few months. It gradually went down and down, until it fluctuated between 80KBps and 200KBps, and sometimes didn't even work at all. DSL with SWBell was almost always 150KBps, though they kept raising the rates. When the service had to be cancelled because it was too expensive($50+ a month).
I'm an ISP and we offer DSL. The local cable company installers recommend us to people and the cable company has several accounts with us. Why? We are much, much faster.
We offer 1500Kbps (and 7100K in some cases). And those speeds are realized (171KBps = 1348Kbps average throughput on 1500Kbps) DSL is not a partyline like cable so our realized throughput is easily 2-10 times faster than the cable company. Cable really sucks in the evenings compared to DSL.
But, in the middle of the night if everyone's computer is off, cable is faster.
I get 1.5\256 with my Bellsouth DSL. Charter in my area is 512/128..haha.
the Political Inquirer
I have my DSL connection all the time. I have full use of that bandwidth at 3am and at 2pm. It doesn't matter.
What good is cable if the "average speed" is higher than DSL? That means that for 16 hours a day (when I'm working and sleeping) my possible speed could be 1.5MB but for the 8 hours a day I actually *USE* the connection, I could be stuck with 48KB while every other yahoo in my neighborhood sucks down pr0n.
Anyway I work at home and cable doesn't let me do what i NEED to do... and they also tend to charge you about $25 *PER STATIC IP*!!! For half that, I get a dozen IPs from my DSL provider.
Your performance depends a whole lot less on what technology you use than the provider that you use.
Where I live I get better performance with my DSL than my neighbors get with their cable modems. It's not drastic but it is noticeable and measureable. In this area cable has a much higher market share so more people are sharing the available bandwidth.
The cable company has also changed hands a few times. When the old companies were looking to sell, they weren't looking to put a lot of money into upgrades and maintenance. I imagine that they were more likely to let things become oversubscribed rather than pour capital into a system that they were looking to unload anyway.
I agree 100%.
I had the choice to go DSL or cable and I chose DSL, even though it was going to be slightly more expensive and probably a bit slower. Why would I do that? Because I wanted to support a particular local ISP. They have excellent service, are Linux friendly (you can actually get Linux support), and are reasonable about you running a small server.
This is the type of service I want to encourage, not the service I've seen many of the cable or larger DSL providers give. And I'm willing to pay a little more for it too. In the end, I've been extremely happy with the choice.
Who said Freedom was Fair?
I live in Morris County, New Jersey and those Optimum Online Fookers capped my upload to 120kpbs.
All you people drooling over OOL, do not, because they have started capping. See this thread on Dslreports.com to read the anger of fellow Cablevision customers who are capped, and you can also read the pro-corporation consumers deserve no rights shills defending any action from Cablevision.
i run SMTP, and while port 80 is blocked, a web server on 81. they have no problem with this. we have no bandwidth hog charges, but if you use a ton of bandwidth over a long period of time, they will put a temporary one-week cap on your downstream. i have no upstream cap (same up speed as down). they permit me to use NAT and a firewall. the service has not gone down in over a month.
compare this to Verizon DSL i previously had: 5 (FIVE) months waiting to install, constant downtime (at least twice a week), capped upstream and serious lag.
thought you might be interested.
I have choice of ISP with DSL here in Portland. (www.spiretech.com BTW.)
Comcast has the cable service here. They fuck with you and my Spiretech does not.
So I trade speed for:
- Shell access via SSH to my account on their server.
- Some web space and basic services on their end.
- Sane user policy
- Good service
- Flexible billing. (I run a 6 month plan)
- Choice of computing platform and modem.
Unless I am downloading ISOs every day, the connection speed really does not matter. Most wait times are due to server side crap (mainly ad servers and such) not transfer speed.
Sure the cable is fast, but you have to register each computer, cannot run servers, get port scanned to make sure, vpn not allowed unless you pay commercial rates, poor customer service, drain bramaged techs, phone calls and letters and e-mail for additional cable TV services (Pay Per view) and I suspect content discrimination.
That is what choice is about.
Choose wisely, choose a service that lets you choose your provider.
For me that is clearly DSL regardless of speed.
Blogging because I can...
Just a quick little test (clear cache and move ethernet cable) between DSL and cable showed...not too much difference.
...and the 'oddball'
BandwithPlace 1.8mpbs (cable) 1.2mpbs (dsl)
CNet 959kpbs (cable) 994kpbs (dsl)
BroadbandReports 1143kpbs (cable) 1203kpbs (dsl)
Toast 2.5mpbs (cable) 1.4mpbs (dsl)
As for browsers - Netscape (7.2) beat the pants off MSIE. Netscape consistantly brought home better times than MSIE.
Considering that Adelphia's service was down for around 3-5 days out of an average month, I think I'll keep my Bellsouth DSL.
But they don't even talk about upload, which is where DSL stomps all over cable's ass.
Why do you say that? Most DSL I've seen sold (around here at least) is ADSL, with a cap about the same as for the local cable company.
Read a typical cable modem service ToS some time -- go on, I dare you! You can't run anything but Windows, you can't run NAT, you can't run services, you can't leave your computer on when you're not in front of it. Now read a DSL ToS for comparison.
Most of those are untrue for OptOnline... you can't run servers, but the rest is ok. And many DSL providers are exactly the same... or may offer better plans, but at a price premium.
Right now I have DSL through SBC. I used to have service through Time-Warner/Roadrunner, but gave it up last year. Why, you may ask? Simple: reliability.
Everything was fine with Roadrunner for about a year or so, until we started having line issues. After that, about every six months, we would end up having issues with the physical cable going from our junction box out back to the house. Each time, it would take us more than one call to get someone out, because the quality of techs were rather... well, varied. ("I know you don't support Linux... but the fact that the `Cable' light on my cable modem isn't lit tells me it's not a problem with my cable modem, you know?") The second to last time it happened, the tech lied and said he came out when someone was home at the time and never saw him, and the line had very obviously not been touched. The LAST time it happened, it took them TWO WEEKS to send someone out and fix it. The day after that, we started investigating DSL.
Frankly, we've been much happier with the DSL. We started off with DirecTV DSL and since moved to SBC... and not only is the service more reliable so far than Roadrunner's (excluding DirecTV getting out of the market... otherwise only slightly slower speeds but steadier connection), we're allowed to run servers and can host our own domains on it. Heck, for $15 a month more I get static IP's, which means no more worrying about the DHCP server switching my home address on me.
Your mileage may vary, of course, but so far I've found that in my area, at least (north Houston), DSL has shaped up to be more reliable than cable service.
Just my $.02...
... and in other news, "Apples beat Oranges in a taste test, experts insist".
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
Costs to the long-haul providers that own fiber is virtually nil at this point. There is MASSIVE overcapacity in dark fiber AND newer technology pushes more bits per second over existing links. There is NO long-haul bandwidth shortage in the US. Bandwidth problems occur at the DSL DSLAM / cable head ends, peering links, etc. which are easily solved with money. Cable companies just don't make enough off internet service to fix problems though. When a segment maxes, they don't bother to split it. Guess where cable companies buy their bandwidth and long-haul links - the telcos...
DSL technology at this point has nothing between the CO and the end-user. You have a dedicated wire. Bandwidth problems at the CO level are MUCH easier to solve than cable segment problems which require a field-trip and possibly new fiber installed to a neighborhood POP. Once extended-distance DSL and DLC compatible technology comes online though, this equation changes somewhat.
I hate comcast as much as the next guy, but the self-install kit for my cable modem came with instructions for Mac OS 9, and they walked me through doing it for Mac OS X over the phone. They also helped where they could while I set up a wireless basestation so I could share my connex. The dude on the phone didn't seem to mind me connecting a linux machine, either, although he couldn't help me.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
My cablevision speeds
.. above the 1mbit barrier!
2003-04-24 11:38:03 EST: 8204 / 739
Your download speed : 8204045 bps, or 8204 kbps.
A 1001.4 KB/sec transfer rate.
Your upload speed : 739827 bps, or 739 kbps.
Seems like broadband
sure cable does quite nicely for the downstream, but what about uploads? i know my cable company, Insight Communications, caps uploading to 15k/sec max. i imagine some people cant live with this, but then again i hear about other cable companies who aren't nearly as harsh. in any case, anyone who needs some sort of psuedo server environment where they may be uploading quite a bit, dont get insight.
I live in a city of like 20000 people. The nearest other city is 150km away. We have ADSL. Fifty canadian bucks a month gets me 2.4MBit ADSL, no caps, limits, anything goes. Three static IPs.
They even have 7 and 5 MBit ADSL for other people. All in the same price range.
They talk about the speeds of these services using a single number
That's not the impression I got. Maybe I missed something in the article (which I did read). C|Net have had a broadband metering page for quite some time. I assume they've been compiling the results, and this article is summerizing them. If that's the case, these numbers are the average of a great many participants.
I had SBC DSL and it SUCKED. Badly.
I constantly fought with them, they never got it to work right, had to unplug all but one phone just to get the modem to sync, very poor speed vs what was promised.
constant over billing, double and tripple billing, billing for installs that never happened, you name it, average over $100 a month in over billing, often worse than that.
Switched to RR and man it just smokes. That's all there is to it. All that FUD that SBC put out about your neighbors pulling the line down was just BS.
Cable is much, much, much faster and they don't rape you in the hiney every month like the DSL idiots do.
Let's see, I'm paying $80 a month, but I get a local phone line, 300 min of long distance, 960/960 adsl with 5 static ips (a little bit extra a mo), can ping yahoo in 46ms...and lets see it has gone down...once that I know of(in 2+ years) except for a 6hr backbone outage. DSL is much more reliable, but you have to find the right provider. Have fun running a server on cable that can upload worth a damn. This line is enough to run web, dns , mail, game server, and still gets the pr0n in a resonable amount of time.(thanx linux router with (QoS) Drink Schlitz and boycott most pies!!!
Sure, lots of folks get frustrated with the techs' ability to get a DSL modem running, but simple line maintenance for most telcos is far more thorough than cable outfits can provide.
Hell, our cable company can't even get all their advertised channels running & the service is out far more often than our phone line. This may be because the nearest cable tech that they even call an "engineer" is over 150 miles away!
djeaux
"Obviously, I'm not an IBM computer any more than I'm an ashtray" (Bob Dylan)
Almost all of the time I get downloads at 100 - 150 Kb/s and I have 1.5 mbit/second cable.
I can't get either cable or dsl, so to me both are equally as fast (or slow!)
This is all very subjective. I currently have Cable where I'm at and the DSL I move away from was MUCH faster. I had a 768k up 768k down line from Verizon (with a 3rd party ISP providing the service) and now I'm on a crappy 512k down (that averages about 400) and 128k up (that averages about 96).
If you want to compare things, try comparing what each can offer. I know that Verizon can offer 7.1m down with 1.5m up and SWBell was able to offer 10m down (burst from 1.5m) with 1.5m up (burst from 384k) at one point (don't know that they still do).... From what I've seen most cable companies only have 2 plans, Residential and Business. And Business of course is better bandwidth, but MUCH more expensive. If you go with a Telco offering under DSL, you have similar limitations in options, but going with a 3rd party ISP you can get MUCH better speeds than I've seen with some cable providers, with a bit more cost in most cases unfortunately.... Again it's all subjective. What are the cable companies in your area doing vs what are the DSL providers doing?
Everybody with cable are complaining about low speed (compared to what they pay for) and frequent service outages. Also, cable providers don't sell more than 640 kbit/s lines.
We have two 2.2 mbit/s DSL lines, for which we pay about $60 pr. month, giving us 400 kb/s downloads, with no service outages the last two years.
Don't know about latency though.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
I can't believe that you guys get those speeds. I'm using at&t and it sucks. My upload rate is a fucking theoretical 0.30 Mb/s which equates to around 30Kbps.
Anyone else use AT&T? What kind of uploads do you get?
Sure, I get about 5 Megabit a sec download, but they have some arbitrary monthly limit (about 6 GB)which if you exceed, they want you to get a business acct. for $150 mo. The cable co is Shaw in Canada.
I'm not qualified to speak for the knowledge and credentials of the developers of the popular p2p file sharing programs. Are you?
In any case, I think there's plenty of issues with the de-facto standard protocols that have been in use for years (such as ftp). (Security is a prime one, to the point where you have to run half the stuff through ssh just to ensure people don't sniff your logins.)
p2p software, like everything else, will evolve as it's used.
Trouble with most cable (coax) is that the drops to subscribers are taken from a loop that covers up to nine blocks. The loop is hard to "just split" because there's still cable TV on the loop, and the signal has to actually *get* to both of the newly split portions. That usually means they have to string a bunch of new cable out a few extra blocks and share bandwidth from another subscriber loop that's not using its bandwidth maximally. It'll only scale like that for a little while before the cable company has to start running expensive coax cable to everyone's home from their offices individually...
But then there's still the telco. And they've already got twisted pair to everyone's home. DSL just keeps improving. In Canada you can get 9Mbps DSL connections already.
My $0.02.
According to the article it sounds like they based the speeds on DSL/Cable Companies everywhere in the US - which opens up a bag of all kinds of worms considering some places are probably set up better for Cable while others for DSL.
In my area I can get a 1.5mbs SBC DSL Connection which when tested runs at anywhere from 768k to 1.2mbs depending on time of day. My buddy who has a Comcast Cable modem in the same area gets anywhere from 128k to 384k depending on time of day.
However - when I used to live in the same general area - different building - DSL was only offered from a wireless provider. I pulled about 256k - 384k connections, but with the Comcast Cable I could pull anywhere from 384k - 512k
In short I don't have a true preference fro what gets me online as long as I can GET ONLINE - but my point is different areas are DEFINATELY set up more ideally for various services (lots of factors involved i'm sure) but in the end saying Cable is faster than DSL or vice-versa is kind of a generalization - it's to broad of blanket - it's like saying "X people are stronger than Y people" - that's just NOT simply true - other factors like what kind of DSL/Cable/Hardware/Wirless - Yes/No?/ etc...
Ave Molech Setting
He is no troll! He speaks the Truth!
+5 Informative
In Calgary, my next door neighbours had Shaw cable internet, and it had slightly higher peak rates than my DSL (up to nearly 300 kilbytes per second), however they basically enjoyed that transfer rate at about 2 to 3 am or during non-peak for a few days after Shaw did whatever monthly upgrading they mentioned on their tech support lines (which usually involved losing internet entirely from Friday just after lunch to Saturday morning). Aside from that, the speed hovered between 15 and 150 kB/s.
On the other hand, my DSL connection was ALWAYS 100 to 150 kB/s. I had maybe ONE day of outage time in an entire year. Then CADVision was bought by TELUS. They intgrated CADvision customers into TELUS infrastructure, and offered piss poor customer service and support during and after the ordeal (my business service lost all it's fixed IPs, they messed up my DNS hosting, etc.) It's my understanding that Shaw has gotten past it's growing pains and now is better for customer service and a bit more consistent where TELUS has deteriorated.
No matter--TELUS chased me away and did NOTHING to lure me back--some customers are even getting so pissed off with them that they are switching their local and long distance phone as well--mostly to make a point about crappy service. I kept the phone but switched to Radiant DSL. I pay C$10/month LESS and consistently get 2 to 2.5 MBps--EXACTLY what was advertised (I got the "business connectivity 2.5" package)! I save money because they make the crap I can do myself optional (I don't need space on their web server and 10 email accounts and DNS hosting--I provide my own DNS, web and email servers). Shaw doesn't offer packages like that--I have to take what they offer and pay maybe 40% more.
So, overall the situation hasn't changed. In Calgary I'd say cable has improved a lot, but some DSL providers still have the edge and are still more consistent.
Download speed isn't the only thing that is important in picking a broadband service.
I have had both AOLTimeWarner Road Runner cable modem service and SBC DSL service. There is no question that Road Runner gave me faster download speed. But, even though my DSL upload speed is capped at 256Mbps. It is actually faster than the upload speed I got out of Road Runner.
Upload speed is important to me because I run a website, and several other servers, out of my loft. Which brings us to other important differences. The ability to get a static IP address and the ability to connect mulitple computers to a single broadband connection.
In my area, SBC sells a static IP service with no limit to the number of computers I can have on my LAN for $78.95/month. While the equivalent service from Road Runner costs $200/month. So, DSL can be a much better deal if you have more than one computer or ever want to run a server. As the number of computers in the home goes up from one per home to more than one per person, the ability to connect mulitple computers become very important.
Customer service is also important. In all the years I have been a customer of Time Warner, both for cable service and broadband, I have only ever had one serious complaint about their service, and they apologized, fixed the problem, apologized again, sent me a letter of apology, and gave me a couple of months of service for free. In other words, they made me feel like a respected and valued customer.
OTOH, In the first month I had SBC DSL service, I was been hung up on by 3 customer service representatives, been promised call backs that never happened, and been billed for a service that has never been fully delivered. In fact, I have filed a PUC complaint over the problem. All I can say is that it only took a week to get them to stop blocking inbound port 80 and outbound port 25. But, to this day they refuse to admit that it ever happened.
I also can not access any of the Yahoo! services they promise because the license for using the Yahoo! service bars you from running servers over your DSL line. Which is exactly what the Deluxe S package is advertised for doing. So, to use the Yahoo! part of the service I have to agree not to use the static IP capabilities of the service. Since I can not access the Yahoo! services I also can not access any of the SBC online help because access to online help is based on your SBC Yahoo! userid/pasword.
I guess that to save $120/month I can live without the Yahoo! part of the deal, but it the way SBC has treated me has really pissed me off. ASAP the ONLY SBC service I have will be DSL.
Stonewolf
Almost everything you said there is untrue.
Most DSL is ADSL, which stands for Asynchronous Digital Subscriber Line. That means that the connection is not a fixed speed. In other words, it's NOT dedicated bandwidth.
At the main hubs, both cable and dsl have to use some other kind of connection to the internet - T1, T3, etc. to connect to the rest of it, and both of them can have bandwidth problems.
The difference that can make you notice is that cable connections can be split much more easily than DSL connections. This means that companies are much more likely to give service when they've already reached capacity, since it's not much more trouble for them.
As far as capping...you must have access to some cable company that I don't know about. I've looked at the main broadband rating website (I think it's here), and it seems that a lot of companies cap the cable modems themselves, and a few do the subnet routers.
In terms of raw bandwidth, it is dsl, not cable, that is a dead-end. Cable services are slowly switching customers over to digital cable services. When this move is complete, all the wasted bandwidth being absorbed by an inefficient analog broadcasting protocol will be available for trasmission (not like they've even maxed out that part now).
In other words, when it is cost effective to offer speeds that are 100x what they are now, DSL won't be able to cut it without adding more wires, but cable will.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
First of all, there is conventional DSL (capped) and then business DSL (less capped). I have business, and my average rate is always a very very nice speed. At the high ends, I can get >1000Kbps uploading to a nearby FTP.
Now cable... when last I had it, it had decent speed up to about 4:00-5:00, at which point many people went online, and speed went down the crapper. I have a friend who has similar problems, as does my girlfriend.
For anyone in an apartment/townhouse or dense neighbourhood type dwelling, I'd recommend against cable, unless you're a midnight warrior when few users are online. Yes, the local junction can still feel strain on DSL if a lot of people are online, but when you're sharing the same downline on an analog medium, you're still going to feel a lot more pain in peak hours.
1) Anyone who says they have fiber to the curb, and use DSL really has fiber, and not truely DSL. Fiber, assuming it's well managed, will always beat both normal DSL, via copper, and HFC cable.
2) On a theoretical level, cable scales better than DSL. With cable, each television channel use to get 30MBits/second downstream and your cable modem itself, would have a 10 MBit/second maximum downstream. You need to scale, add a television channel to the list. To reduce contention, break your segment length down (the most costly of the bunch because you have to go out in the field to make this change). The wavelength division multiplexing for HFC going downstream still still not at the theoretical maximum. Specifications were at 100Mbits/second/channel a year ago and can still improve. So in the longrun, cable's theoretical downstream, and performance will blow away DSL. A well managed cable modem provider will win the download war.
3) Encryption is done via DOCSIS 1.1 compliant modems.
4) ALL ISPS HAVE DIFFERING QUALITY OF SERVICE, IN DIFFERING AREAS. So, one Comcast customer in one area, could have a totally different experience as another. One DSL customer in one location could have a totally different experience elsewhere.
DSL is infinitely faster than cable modems. Why? Because I run my own web and mail servers. The 128K upstream speed that I have (servers allowed by the user agreement) is infinitely faster than the upload speed on a cable modem (servers disallowed by the user agreement).
Besides, I don't send money to cable companies on principle.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
"DSL stomps all over what was left of cable's ass"
I stopped reading your post after reading that snippet insightfulness. When there are hundreds of comments to go through, simple factors like this make easy choices for me.
I absolutely agree with you, but just for the record - I've found these web sites like dslreports that claim to report how far you are from the telco central office are often inaccurate.
Where I live, for example, it still tells me I'm about 14,000 feet from the C.O. so DSL performance will be iffy at best.
Actually, a remote station was installed right by my house, about a year ago, so DSL works great for me. Apparently, these web sites don't have updated information about the remote stations the telcos often set up to extend the range of DSL-capable subscribers.
Well, I can't believe the number of posts that are badmouthing cable service. I did the DSL thing for a couple years, and the upload speed sucked, and the download speed was almost never above 100kbps. With Comcast cable, I now get at least 2x that speed consistently, and even if uploading sucks (which I haven't tried much of), it isn't any worse than DSL.
Bottom line: I'm paying $22/month for the next year of broadband. Everything else falls away when the alternative is $50/month.
And as far as terms of service go... Who really cares? When was the last time you read the license agreement on a piece of software? And then followed it?
"Costs to the long-haul providers that own fiber is virtually nil at this point. There is MASSIVE overcapacity in dark fiber AND newer technology pushes more bits per second over existing links. "
The problem that EVERONE forgets is that the cost of dark fiber isn't in the fiber, but all the cost incurred in making that dark fiber usable. That's like saying there's an overcapacity of "dark" water pipes out there, and newer technology to push more water through those pipes. Now who's going to incur the costs of adding pumps, valves and other equipment to make those pipes usable?
"There is NO long-haul bandwidth shortage in the US."
Uhh...huh. Work in the industry, do you? Now who's money is it going to be to get that "abundance" to your door? It's like saying there's no shortage of food. Except for the little matter of processing the food, storing and distributing it.
"Cable companies just don't make enough off internet service to fix problems though. When a segment maxes, they don't bother to split it."
And guess who's abusing the system, while not paying their fair share?
Nor do they talk about terms of service, which is where DSL stomps all over what was left of cable's ass. Read a typical cable modem service ToS some time -- go on, I dare you! You can't run anything but Windows, you can't run NAT, you can't run services, you can't leave your computer on when you're not in front of it. Now read a DSL ToS for comparison.
I have comcast cable and I have pretty much broken all of the things that you have mentioned. I don't think comcast really cares about any of this, as they have never said anything to me.
SIGFAULT
The vast majority of the rest of the internet couldn't keep up with a 1 MB connection on a good day with the wind blowing in the right direction anyway.
Our local cable company provides 5Mbps connections (for downloads). And guess what, 99% of the time download speeds aren't any faster than the 1.5 Mbps connections dsl providers provide. Unless you're downloading from their local network (ie, their news server) the liklihood of getting a faster-than-dsl download rate is laughably slim.
Most download speeds I get from any given site top out at maybe 25-50KB/s instead of the expected 120+KB/s that is the practical maximum of my DSL connection.
I see no reason why a home connection would need to be faster than this, unless you had a good many parallel connections going.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
When my cable connection was provided by @HOME, I used to see download speeds of 5Mbits/s. When AT&T took over, they capped it at 1.5MB/s. According to a friend, who had @HOME cable during the testing phase, he used to get 10MB/s.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
(Post anonymously, just in case)
TWC-NYC has totally won me over. I've been running a bunch of servers off my CONSUMER TWC IP and I got a phone message about a week ago from TWC-Security. I was thinking "Holy shit, I'm busted" and I called them back.
It turns out they found some holes in my sendmail for spamming and relaying. I told them I'd fix it (which basically amounted to updating sendmail to the newest version) and then they tested for holes again. They offered to help (For FREE) to fix these holes if they still existed, but they didn't.
So TWC basically made a customer for life. That's what I call Customer Service.
I have RoadRunner cable @ 2mbit / 350kbps (tested on DSLReports.com last year) is that any good? It's a lot better than my old 56k modem that wouldn't connect past 44kbps lol.
ping -c5 greatlakes.owo.com
PING central-ae6.owo.com (159.153.226.29): 56 octets data
64 octets from 159.153.226.29: icmp_seq=0 ttl=56 time=15.9 ms
64 octets from 159.153.226.29: icmp_seq=1 ttl=56 time=15.6 ms
64 octets from 159.153.226.29: icmp_seq=2 ttl=56 time=15.6 ms
64 octets from 159.153.226.29: icmp_seq=3 ttl=56 time=17.2 ms
64 octets from 159.153.226.29: icmp_seq=4 ttl=56 time=19.5 ms
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I presently have cable, which is $CDN39.95/month + tax. I'm impressed with the download speeds (250k/sec +), but the reliability is a joke; there's at least half an hour of downtime per day. I also get disconnected several times per day. Several of my friends have the same ISP and they all have the same trouble.
I'm switching to DSL at the end of the month, and I hope it's more reliable.
sure generic mom and pop cable modems are faster when all of the neighbors aren't bogging it down. just don't try to upload anything large or expect to run a useful server.
how many cable modems offer good uplink speeds and static IPs?
my dsl line is 1.5Mbps down and 768kbps up. (yes, i pay double the generic connectivity "$39-49/mo" price for that).
I used to have DSL, but recently switched to cable. The DSL had a static ip, got 768kbps down and 128kbps up(in reality 600/120), and blocked no ports... Unfortunatly my ping times to that same Ultima Online server was in the area of 70-80, and in Counter-Strike had a difficult time finding a sub100ms ping server. Reliability was also a major problem.
Then I got cable. I get consistant 2200/360kbps speeds, 30ms latency to UO servers, sub50ms pings to most CS server, perfect reliability, and no blocked ports. I don't have a static ip, instead i a DNS2GO service. I don't get a top level domain name, but it's no big deal really.
ECS offers 8mbit/1mbit for about $150 if you're willing to shell out that much, or 4mbit/768kbit for $65. Both packages include 5 static IPs. I'm planning on switching from Telus, mainly due to this insane transparent proxy they've installed that's always fucking up. I'm not too optimistic about the bandwidth, however; Telus had problems getting me my 1.5mbit stable...
I live in Northern British Columbia Canada, and have used our local Cable and our Local Telco's DSL and I would say that my DSL is twice the speed most of the time of the Broadband. My $0.02
DSL is about the same as cable, but unquestionably better for most people who have a choice.
:o)
DSL is capped at 512 down 256 up, cable 600/128 (for most home users).
The extra upload bandwidth for DSL users it a boon for geeky types, as it makes saturation harder, but 128 is ok for home use.
Cable in the UK however is almost without exception:
Servers restricted or banned.
Download caps of 1gb/day.
Horrible contention at peak times.
For many users, when the 201st person logs onto their cable section all the users get booted off.
Bad news and mail service.
Trasparent (slow) proxy/cache for http.
Single dynamic IP.
SMTP capture/redirects.
24 hour (in the phone queue) tech support.
Crap modems which need rebooting once a day.
MAC address locking, one host connected only.
For the same price as cable on DSL you get (this exculdes users of BT Openwoe, but with DSL you can choose your ISP):
Servers ok.
Almost no contention (avg rates at peak time are 460k/sec).
1 static IP address.
Good mail and news service.
No SMTP or HTTP proxy.
No download caps.
Very high reliability.
Choose your own modem, which works.
No MAC address locking and positive support for NAT DSL gateway users.
And for less than £5/mth more than cable you get (in addition):
8 static IP addresses (/29).
Decent technical support 9-5.
And if you live in London, for an additional £10/mth you get 2mb down during off peak hours. Sweet!
I will never change to cable
Beep beep.
You could actually have tried to convince us of something, but instead you're foaming about cable users being nothing but pron-viewing ingrates and so on... How did you expect to win someone over when you'd gone after them that way? (Leaving alone how stupid the charge is. DSL users don't view pron, of course. Not them. They're holy and pure technology Monks.)
You're putting the blinders on yourself along the way, too. I mean,
Has anyone ever seen that in a real cable TOS agreement, or are you just making it up 'cause it sounds good? Why are you so worked up over this that you'd lie, or at least half lie, to yourself?? You work for Qwest or something?
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
I use Comcast Cable Internet in Colorado, and my average upload download speeds are: ~1700 kbps download ~300 kbps upload As tested on PCPitStop.com Is my service just incredibly good? 800 kbps seems VERY slow. Conversely, on my univeristy campus, as of right now, I'm getting only ~1300 kbps- though sometimes I can get as high as ~3000 kbps, so it varies a bit.
This statement is solely an opinion. Kindly take it as such in all cases.
I disagree! In my area:
Cable:
a) Only three ports are firewalled, those being for common windows trojans.
b) Never a charge for excessive bandwith (I download/upload several gigs a week).
c) Never gets bogged down.
d) Has a 60KB/s upstream cap which I never notice, and an insane 1 MB/s (byte!) download cap.
e) Is part of the internet at large. I'm not foolish enought to stick an un-firewalled machine on a live IP.
DSL:
a) Has many server ports firewalled, including 80 and 25.
b) Gets slow during the day (not bad after 9 pm though).
c) Charges by the extra MB.
d) Has a 64KB/s upstream cap, with download rates between 150 and 200 KB/s.
e) Is also part of the Internet at large.
So please stop making broad gernalisations.
He who laughs last is stuck in a time dilation bubble.
I have adsl, and my total up/down speed seems to be around 1.875 Mbps down, 1.125Mbps upload. Adsl tends to be ok for surfers and downloaders, but a gamer takes a bad hit and would prefer cable with its symetrical paramters,
I pray at night for ComWeb, with its 10 G min speed.
Disclaimer: I work for the local telco
Now that said, I'm not in marketing, I'm a field tech, and I get this question a lot, I have a fair amount of experience with both systems, (my parents are on cable (no dsl in their area yet) and I have a few good friends working for the local cable company) so I'll try to be relatively unbiased here.
I'm often asked "how does DSL compare to cable" the real answer is it doesn't, the two are different technologies. and can't be dirrectly compared to come up with an answer of "X is faster than Y", here are a few points to consider...
The theoretical end of things:
-the local cable company uses cable modems with a maximum possible speed of 10Mb/s downstream (I can't remember the upstream)
-the local telco uses equipment (DSLAMs and DSL modems) with a maximum possible speed of 8Mb/s downstream and 1MB/s upstream
The administrative side of things:
-the local cable company throttles this to 1.5Mb/s downstream (I can't remember what they set the upstream to)
-the local telco throttles this to 1.5Mb/s downstream and 640kb/s upstream
The practical downside of things:
-Cable is usage dependant, the cable system is based on one line running in to the neighborhood and splitting to all the houses, so the more people online at a time the slower the connection.
-DSL is distance dependant, you've got just over 3km of cable before you can't get DSL, and if you're over 2-2.5km you won't be getting full speeds, so just because you have a phoneline doesn't mean you can get DSL.
The practical upside of things:
-Cable being shielded can run for amazing lengths with verry little loss allowing extended distances, if you have cable tv around here you can probably get cable internet
-DSL runs on the phoneline, and you have your own line from your house to the phone exchange, so you don't share bandwidth with anyone untill you get back to the phone exchange, (you do from there on out just like you would with any ISP but there's lots to go around (at least around here there is))
The practical summary:
-if you live a long way from a phone exchange in a community full of people who use the computer only for their email once a day. Cable is going to be faster.
-if you live really close to the phone exchange in a community full of slashdotters. DSL is going to be faster.
Now most of us don't live in either one of those sittuations, so around here at least, the two compare verry closely on the home packages. the main difference is stability (the kind affecting speed, the kind affecting uptime isn't discussed here), on DSL you get what you get, if you got speeds of 1Mb/s when they hooked you up, you'll probably continue to get that speed, whereas on cable you may get 1.5Mb/s at slack times and 500-600kb/s at busy times, it all depends on what type of usage you have and at what times you make use of it.
Final Disclaimer: I only compared the "home" packages here, and only on the point of speed, there are many other factors to consider when getting a connection, both companies offer many packages catering to different needs at different costs, do your research before going with either, just keep the stuff mentioned here in mind because the marketting departments of neither company will ever mention the downsides to their own system....
i get 300K to 500K down loads... thats 3000+kb
Why is everyone on this post describing their own personal DSL and Cable experiences? The study was an average of cable and DSL...and found that on average Cable was faster. DSL may be faster in your area, that's great. If you look at all of the areas combined, DSL is slower.
I work for TEC and I have RR also ... we have a speed test site set up http://www.discoversandiego.com/speed/
At my house with my locked modem, I get about 1.3 Mbps over are 802.11B it dropes to 760 Kbps.
I dont know what is going on in the world but here in Newfoundland Canada we get 1.5mbps DSL as the base package and the cable connections top out at 800kbps. I routinely download using my DSL at a rate of an average of 150Kbps. Yes Kbps not kbps.
This is one of the stupidest tests I have ever seen.
They are comparing DSL to Cable for bandwidth... without giving specs on the DSL. DSL is not the same as cable!! Cable is a community shared network, and DSL is a DIRECT line. If you buy DSL at 768k, your going to get 768k! They completely forgot to mention this little tidbit of information in the article.
Sure, your basic cable connection dollar for dollar is going to be faster. $35 will get you a cable internet connection, its usually atleast $50 for DSL ( of the 768/256 category).
I just dont get how 'technical articles' can be written by people who obviously have no technical background.
-Bill
-Bill
Cox Cable HSI (Hi Speed Internet) here in the :^) I
Cleveland, Ohio, area is VERY reliable and VERY
fast! I have had outages, usually lasting only
a few minutes. The only times it was worse than
that was when commercial power (as opposed to
residential power) was lost on their side of town
and cable TV and internet were gone for almost
two days (not their fault, and they brought in a
generator to get cable TV back up before the
power company could get things fixed). The other
two times were also due to power loss, but lasted
less than a day. In each instance, they credited
my account (although I did have to call). I check
my speed regularly, on what I find to be a very
consistent test site (if it feels slow to me the
test shows it is, and if it feels fine to me the
test shows it is), and I get the advertised
"up to" speeds of 3 Mbps download and 256 Kbps
upload. I also use other test sites and see good
results. Cox customer service is FANTASTIC! I
hardly ever have to wait, and they are VERY
friendly (at both the local and HSI 800). The
cost is $44.95 per month, but since we also have
regular cable TV it is only $34.95 per month. I
imagine that at least the local service will vary
from area to area. If you are in the Cleveland,
Ohio, area you could do worse (like SBC)!
only wish that I could run servers, but the TOS
says no. Perhaps this will change with the
increased competition mentioned in the article!
Cablevision/Optimum Online is definately insanely fast. I downloaded the matrix reloaded trailer at like a constant 1mb/sec...
Apparently, though, they have an outgoing bandwidth limit... something like only 1 gig per 24 hours or something of that sort. I heard this from a friend of a friend, though, so it may not be true. If anyone knows anything more about this, please reply!
SuPz.orG
I'm not sure how CNet screwed up so badly as to miss the Boston area when determining who has the "fastest" connections, but out here, we get a full 1.5Mbit downstream and 350Kbit upstream.
(Yet Another Useless Plug)
Yeah, I've been on (what is now) SBC DSL for over 3 years. I've always consistently gotten ~ 1.5 Mb download, ~350(ish) Kb uploads.
I've had DNS, Email, Web, NTP, and SSH running on it basically the whole time, with NAT behind it. Actually, this is largely because at first, their DNS and EMail services were intermittent. (at best) I understand that they've gotten quite a bit better.
The only thing is that I have to lie a bit when calling tech support and pretend I'm running 'doze. But, more than once, I've been told that it's not a *problem* running *nix, (or Win 98) there's just no tech support.
Heck, SBC/Yahoo have this "Home Network Kit" they sell, that's essentially a DSL/Router with built-in PPPOE, NAT and DHCP!
Never a problem, never a complaint. And it works 24x7 with very few issues over the past 3 years. Hell, I've had a customer with a T1 have more issues!
I probably average ~ 25-50 GB (yes, BYTES) of transfer a month, most at night when performing off-site backups.
-Ben
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
BULLSHIT!
Show us some real performance proof. No answer? Yeah, thought so...
The article is too generalized. ISP speed and reliability are very much dependend on where you want to order service. I'd advise checking out a site such as Broadband Reports to find the best ISP in any area.
I ditched Speakeasy (768/768 $80) for Cyberonic (1500/768 $40) and like it. Static IPs, fast pings, less downtime, shorter hold times.
Da Blog
Here in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, if your cable is dishing a mere 800kbps there's something wrong somewhere, and you're entitled to a service call to fix the problem. My own connection at home averages about 5Mbps, and has for a long long time. Yet I always hear about how cable is just barely better than DSL in the states. They better get it together, it's obviously not impossible, so what's the problem?
no, really.
when i first got dsl, it was under the old bellatlantic name. set up was a pain in the ass-- weeks and weeks of waiting to get things turned on, delays, more delays, and even more delays.
then bam! they turned into verizon dsl. i have to say that this was the best thing to happen to me and my intarrnet habits. why?
their customer service.
i kid you not.
it's so bad, that it took them weeks to troubleshoot my connection, having me do all sorts of nutty and zany things like unplugging everything plugged into my computer. like, 20 times. they shuffled me back and forth to higher- and lower-tier technicians. i documented everything-- every phone call, the dates and time-- everything. in notepad, the log file grew to somewhere around 60k. SIXTY K! (in word, it'd be like 4 megs, but that's another issue.)
armed with logged experiences of poor technical support, i asked to speak with customer service. they apologized profusely and offered to pro-rate the billing. they offered two weeks. i laughed. the problems i had lasted nearly a month. i laughed more. they asked me what would be acceptable, and i said at LEAST a couple of months.
so, bam! i got a couple of months free. but here's where the kicker is. here's where things get good, and here's why i _LOVE_ verizon dsl:
they're so inept, that somehow they lost my account information or something. i ended up getting 1.5 YEARS of dsl for _free_.
recently i had flooky connection problems, where i'd just get disconnected. turned out some settings for my account on their end were screwy and never updated. they should've been when bellatlantic turned into verizon. they fixed everything, but unfortunately, they also fixed the billing problems. now i have to pay. 8/
When we had Time Warner cable in Austin, I was fairly impressed. After we moved to Pflugerville, we switched to Cox cable. All I can say is it was HORRIBLE - poor bandwidth and high latency.
So... we switched to SBC DSL. Now, I want to be clear that we can see a SBC service center (in the distance) from our house, so we are close to our CO.
We had both for about a week. I ran the following tests. Before each test, I completely cleared the memory and disk caches to make sure I was grabbing a fresh copy.
www.pcpitstop.com/internet/bandwidth.asp
Running T1/Cable Modem speed test
Transmission speed with CABLE: 289 kbps
Transmission speed with DSL: 1180 kbps
http://bandwidthplace.com/speedtest/
Running Fast test
379.7 kilobits per second with CABLE
1.2 megabits per second with DSL
http://www.gtlakes.com/internet/speedtest/
High Bandwidth test
378.4 Kbps with CABLE
1181.6 Kbps with DSL
But.... that's not the worst part.
Cox Cable switched to two-hour IP leases. With a two hour lease, every two hours our internet connection dropped for a few seconds. Our local machines are all behind NAT, so their IP wasn't changing. This SUCKS when you do things like online gaming, because you get kicked offline. We had to pay an extra $15 a month for a static IP just so we didn't have to use their DHCP service.
With DSL, we have PPPoE. Now, I used to think that PPPoE sucked, because I had to have special software on my PC. But, with a router, I don't! Instead, my router logs me on. And it can keep my sessions up for 6.9999 days, then it automatically renews it. SBC IP leases are -three year- leases, because they know that they can reassign it every time we refresh. Thus, I now have 7 day IPs, MUCH better than Cox.
Finally, for whatever reason, our cable service had VERY bad packet loss. They saw no reason to fix it, as we could still do most things. (I know, not every person with cable will have this, but it was a factor for us.) We lost about 30% of our outgoing packets.
P.S. And now that we aren't tied to Cox for internet, we can save another $15 a month switching to satellite TV service.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
I'm currently on Telus in Edmonton, as well. And I've got a grandfathered 5-ip server package. I'm also getting damned irritated with the customer service. I run a webserver, and I can't connect to it from my desktop half the time, because of their delightful "block out things on the same subnet" policy.
I haven't seen any good replacements.. I'm not too thrilled with going to Shaw, since I do a phenomenal amount of downloading - 10 gigs in 2 weeks is normal for me. (yay for anime fansubs!)
I like Telus because they have no limits on the bandwidth. Apart from that, they suck ass.
-- Karma is for people who think they matter.
Got a link to ECS somewhere? I haven't heard of them before.
-- Karma is for people who think they matter.
This may be an average of DSL versus Cable connects, but I am consistently in the T1 range by any given test, yep DSL. Your mileage MUST vary considerably, or the people who answered some poll lied.
www.ecscorp.net It was rather difficult to find in the first place, I get the feeling they're not a huge provider..the best kind ;)
You usually have only a single cable provider in your area, but depending on where you are, you may have as many as a dozen or more DSL providers to choose from. Which means some ToS competition. Most smaller providers don't really care WHAT you do. And with DSL you can at least pay for better, less restricted service. With cable there's one, at most two packages, and they all suck uniformly WRT ToS.
Surrey is also in British Columbia Canada aswell as in the uk (google always shows up uk info for me aswell).
Surrey is where alot of vancouver people live. we have shaw cable (decent speeds with 6gb dl max/month and 1gb ul/month).
telus is the phone company here in surrey and they are capped at 5gb down 1 gb up.
shaw doesn't really enforce the download as i can do 6gb/day down and they don't care. it's the upload they care about.
telus DOES care about speeds though. it is also a bit slower aswell.
on a good eonnection i've seen 450kb/sec (multiple connections of 100+kb/sec for one file).
the only thing i al looking for is a way to change my ip on here.
but yeah, surrey is also in bc. i live in surrey.
(if anyone wants to lan it up for gaming/other cool lan stuff, bluetiger50@yahoo.ca)
Water is wet.
The SARS business is way overrated. The travel advirosy is BS because the disease is all contained and all existing cases have known links to the original cluster. It's a good way to increase ratings on news anyhow. The number of cases went down today and the probabability of catching the disease in TO is in the same range of being struck by lightning.
Far from it. Speed, in fact, is about second or third on my priorities list when it comes to looking at broadband.
What is a priority for me is whether I can be completely self-hosted. Find me a cable provider that will give me six static IP's, let me be completely authoritative on DNS for all the domains I host, and let me handle my own mail, web, and FTP servers, AND do it all for less than I'm currently paying for my DSL line and ISP, and I might consider switching.
In summary; Don't just look at the line speed. Ask yourself what you want to do with it. Somehow, I doubt any of the cable providers are willing to even consider letting their users do any or all of the above for less than hundreds of $$ per month (if at all).
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
I just ordered Speakeasy - for me a simple choice between someone who welcomes servers, and a range of cable modem providers that do not.
I had WideOpenWest at my last place, and would use them again - 3Mb or 10Mb connections that generally worked pretty well. Not sure what they capped upload at, but it seemed pretty decent. However, they had no plans to offer static IP's and only "allowed" two machines at once... sure you can NAT but why not buy a service that welcomes what you want to do? Makes it a lot easier to get support if something weird comes up.
Speakeasy's 1500/768 service was at a pretty good price (around $75, I think) and though the download speed is a little slower than what I had I'll be able to host stuff at home that I could not before.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I don't see why this message is more of a flame than #5798101.
I have a cable connection with NTL in Belfast. Very quick and very low latency. In network games I (almost) always have the lowest latency!
Its a shame I am moving soon to an area were cable is not available. Neither is (A)DSL at the moment...the joys of living in the UK.
With SBC I get about 1.2Mbps (150KB/sec) downstream but only about 128Kbps up (~15KB/sec). Plenty fast downstream for practically everything (about 2 hours per gigabyte), but it would be nice to have faster upstream. A hell of a lot better than cable in my area; the only cable operator in my town doesn't offer cable internet service (despite the city being home to one of the UC's, so 20,000+ college types living there. Seems like ideal customers to me). All that for only $50 a month (for the next step up in service it is $80 a month).
DSL is just too unreliable. Think about it..there is a direct connection between your dsl modem and a dsl modem at the phone company. If the modem at the phone company dies, then you and just you are out of luck until they fix it. Cable on the otherhand is more group oriented. If the cable goes down, then everyone is affected and thats better for you because someone else will probably notice it first and report it. You may not see the downtime. Certainly they will hear about it and fix it. Sure, you share your bandwidth with other people. But DSL users all share bandwidth from the bank of modems on up.
I personally dont see how the Bells can survive. The product is just silly. Now, if they changed the last mile to digital and handed everyone a free internet connection but made you pay to rent little boxes to strip off packets for a handset, then they might survive. Otherwise I dont think they can. I no longer have a phone line at all. My friends are doing the same. Time for the bells to go for the long pass. They have no time left in the game.
Actually! DSL is faster than average Cable speeds. :)
:) Even 1mbit DSL is 124 Kbytesps, consistent, ALWAYS.
If you live in Canada! As I've heard this to be true in the U.S with those cheap phone networks
In Canada I'm sitting on a 3mbit residential DSL line. Consistent, reliable bandwidth rate of 376 Kbytesps.
That's right, download 1 megabyte in just under 3 seconds. 50 megs in 2 mins.
I must mention I was a cable believer before trying DSL. A misserable support and bandwidth service from the local Rogers Cable provider.
Also important to note this is an 18 story apartment building. Copper wire is much more reliable than cable anything
Most domains achieve these speeds, amazing how fast the internet really is nowadays.
So I completely disagree with the article =)
Here in Canada I get about a Mbps on DSL. Cable here is even faster than that. But who really cares. your penis size is not related to your broadband speed.
My upload speed is capped at around 128 Kb/s, and (unless you pay extra) most basic DSL services have similar caps.
I get ADSL from my local telephone company (CenturyTel). It's a 512/256 connection, so my upload is twice what a typical cable modem user gets. And I consider this to be a relatively slow DSL connection. (But I've had very few problems with the service, especially compared to some DSL horror stories I've heard.)
...and statistics.
No link to a real study. No mention of sample size, geographic region(s) sampled, times of day samples were taken, or even what they think they mean by "average."
Add a healthy dose of anecdotal "evidence" from slashdotters both confirming and debunking these so-called "results" and you have... well, you have what's become too typical of slashdot stories.
optimist: The glass is half full.
pessimist: The glass is half empty.
me: What makes you think that's water in there?
I get ADSL from my local telephone company (CenturyTel). It's a 512/256 connection, so my upload is twice what a typical cable modem user gets. And I consider this to be a relatively slow DSL connection. (But I've had very few problems with the service, especially compared to some DSL horror stories I've heard.)
... It's different elsewhere, I guess. :-)
I've been shopping for DSL access here because I want to host a server, but almost everything I've seen is 128 upload, hence my comment
-- shayborg
if you are promised up to 1.5 mb and get 675 kb because it is shared, and you compare that to a promise of 1.5 that is fulfilled because dsl is NOT shared...
Sounds like more propagande promoted by the cable companies.
Yes, thank you. I was making fun of Surrey, BC. I probably don't need to explain why, what with you living there and all.
Heh, and how many files did you have available for p2p? No caps here unless you're sharing a lot of shit - and that's not punitive as much as protective; OOL's upstreams are getting clogged with kazaa/gnutella/morpheus/&c.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
How can they do a comparison with a single number? We need upload AND download speeds to do a comparison....
Or perhaps, that is their whole angle. A 384/384 DSL connection is slower than a 800/20 cable connection? Which, in theory, would be true for downloads -- but I personally run a server.
People need to understand statistics before they start writing articles about them. It is like that new cable commercial where they said "In a study of auto accidents, 1/3rd of all those tested were under the influence of Marijuana"... Ok, but how many were not tested? How many were also under the influence of alchohol, crank, PCP, etc? How many of them were under age? How many were.....
IMHO, that article used completely useless statistics. If you really want to know, use dslreports
Malachi
http://www.google.com/profiles/malachid
I can't get DSL or cable modem. I don't even think I can get digital cable. Can't afford satellite (and don't really want it anyway). Phone lines are crappy, so my 56K connects at about 26.4. Yay, Ohio.