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."

Comments

Re:Sounds right...

[hbackert]

Here in Tokyo, the place where you want to be when you want Internet connections for cheap, the standard DSL service is 12Mbit/s down, 1Mbit/s up. For abour Yen 3000 (about US$ 26). And so far no restrictions. And it's fast (within Japan 900kbyte/s if the server is fast enough, to USA usually 200kbyte/s).

Everything else in Japan and especially in Tokyo is expensive. But Internet is as cheap as you can imagine.

Meaningless stats

[shoppa]

Cablevision reportedly having the fastest connections, averaging 800kbps, or 13kbps above the industry average

So, the fastest is a whopping One point six percent faster than average.

DSL providers showed huge swings in performance. AT&T WorldNet averaged 762kbps, 63 percent faster than the industry average of 467kbps. SBC came in second with 584kbps, EarthLink in third with 369kbps and Qwest in fourth with 240kbps.

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.

Just the opposite

[delcielo]

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.

Re:Speed isn't the only criterion

[Chanc_Gorkon]

I have Roadrunner and use NAT. Only way they are not "NAT friendly" is if you try and call for support and then I just tell them the bare minimum. I usually say yeah I tried everything your going to tell me and I am still having a problem....NEVER mention the router, although they are ok with them, they generaly will want you to recable direct to the cable modem (as if that will magically give you an IP when their DHCP server is down). Also telling them you changed nothing usually helps a bit too (they usually accuse you of mucking with your settings...). They also "lie" and tell you your speeds will be slower through a router. Yeah they may be a little slower, but nothing you'd notice as usually your conenction to the router already runs faster anyway (100 Mbps between host and router). I wish all of the providers would have "check your list of downed servers and/or areas FIRST" as the first item.....usually they will tell you that they have no problems, but then when you cajole them to look further they say opps...the DHCP server is down....DUH! What good is connectivity if I can't get a IP?

Re:Not Always True

[PenguiN42]

If you could get kazaa users to use some other p2p program that isn't spyware,

You mean kazaa lite?