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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."
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.
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.
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
Yes, cable's more vulnerable to that - although with DSL, you're still sharing the backhaul pipe from the DSLAM to the ISP, and of course all the ISP's customers are sharing the ISP's pipe(s) to the rest of the Net. The tradeoff is that cable has much more bandwidth to share.
In theory, with some clever traffic shaping, you could give "interactive" users the full bandwidth of the pipe (in short burts) - so when you view a webpage, it arrives at many megabits/sec. Then after, say, the first megabyte (a fraction of a second at full bandwidth for a cable segment), start throttling back to the "bulk download" rate. That could give insanely fast interactive performance (even really bloated webpages would appear in a flash, if the remote server can manage it) without taking the financial hit of Kazaa users eating a couple of Mbps 24x7.
P2P is, as you say, a huge problem on cable segments (and on DSL: it's still shared once you reach the exchange); one user running Kazaa can easily eat the bandwidth of a few dozen "normal" users. Either the ISP has to buy a load more bandwidth to cope (and a massive price hike to cover it), or do something to stop them: traffic shaping, ban it (and enforce that ban), or impose traffic quotas.
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...
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.
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
until everyone up your street gets cable because of this report and yer speed drops.... ;)
Cable modem scales a lot better. They can have one hub serving an wide area, and if the speed drops then the area can be installed by installing a 2nd hub and splitting the area into two. With DSL, every line has to go all the way into a (physically restricted in size) exchange.
In Surrey, I had both cable modem and DSL. Cable modem was both faster and had better ping time for gaming.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
From RoadRunner (Time Warner) Midsouth, to one of the Ultima Online game servers I play:Having read the UO message boards for a long time, it seems like DSL users tend to get slightly better pings (averaging 15-20ms, I've seen some on speakeasy who claim pings of 5ms). However, I'm perfectly able to compete with my latency. I'd rather have a 40ms ping average to game, and also be able to download at 250KB/sec.
It really depends on what you use your connection for the most, and how you prioritize those uses. Someone who is generally a casual uploader/downloader but does a ton of gaming might be better off with DSL, for the apparent latency boost. Someone like me, who enjoys gaming but spends a lot of time uploading and downloading as a coder/sysadmin is better off with cable and its apparent throughput boost.
For me, it boils down to the work side of things. I have (among others) one mysqldump that's over 900 megs, which I download 3 times a week to maintain as an offsite backup[1]. There are a number of other dumps I download for backup purposes as well, probably totalling 500+ megs in their own right. When it comes to downloading 900 megs - or especially a gig and a half - there's a noticeable difference between a 150KB/s download cap and a 250KB/s download cap. I can give up a few lag-deaths in Ultima Online now and then as a tradeoff to getting my "important" file transfers faster.
At the risk of sounding like a Time Warner apologist (I have a rather botched history with AOL, so believe me I'm no fan) I have to say that cable has always been more appealing to me than DSL. Then again, I've always been more concerned with how fast I can download
Just my two cents.
[1] Yeah, I'm probably one of those hated "power users" from the cableco's standpoint. `ipfw show` claims ~32 gigs in 24 days uptime, but until I hear any complaints, I figure I'll use the broadband I pay for.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
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.)
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
It's definitely critical to me. I've been looking for a job for the last month and the best places to look are on the Net. Of course, dial-up is sufficient for that... but I also run my own little server (mail, web) on my connection. Consequently DSL is the only legal option since Roadrunner's idea of residential "service" is a cold ass ramming.
I shouldn't have to lie, cheat, and steal to get great service. This is why I use Open Source software. This is why I chose DSL over Cable, despite the bandwidth and latency differences. The cost is the same with DSL and I get great TOS/AUP.
Anyway, randomness,
-l
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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.
Though the problems from Kazaa etc. are often because most modern P2P applications are very wasteful of bandwidth. IIRC, Kazaa does a bunch of "tricks" to try to detect and circumvent attempts to throttle its bandwidth, restrict outgoing connections, etc. The end result is a lot of garbage traffic that is not, strictly speaking, necessary for the protocol.
I believe (though haven't checked personally) that newer open-source P2P software like BitTorrent is more responsible about this.
Also, note that you're drastically overstating the cost of bandwidth to the ISP. Bandwidth is naturally cheap, the only time its really expensive is when a telco monopoly controls it. (As cheap bandwidth is against their percieved best interest) The real problem is often upstream bandwidth - many broadband ISPs seem to have assumed that usage patterns would be unchanged from dialup. The idea that an always-on, high-speed connection might lead to people uploading/hosting more never seems to have occurred to them. (Nor that this is desirable, as it creates value for their other customers at no real cost to them)
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
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?
I'm not a big fan of Comcast either, but this is pretty one sided.
Disclaimer: I'm using Comcast Cable Modem service (because I'm 13km from my CO).
Cable:
a. How many DSL providers let you run servers? My friend's DSL connection doesn't allow for servers or VPNs. Granted you can buy DSL from competing companies (which is the #1 reason it is more attractive to me than Cable, where you have to deal with your local monopoly), but the "default" service from most places disallows uploads.
b. Not yet, but soon.
c. I don't really see this myself. Maybe my area isn't so bad. I've not really heard of people complaining about this recently, alhough it was a big problem when Cable was first coming out.
d. Yep, that horrible 128k cap. Compared to DSL, which usually has a 128k/256k upload cap.
e. There is security built into the cablemodem, but the cable company doesn't really seem to keen on actually turning it on. OTOH, the packets that you can "sniff" off of the cablemodem (not easy) are the packets you were sending out to the internet anyway. If you were expecting your traffic to be secure I have news for you.
DSL:
a. Not with the plans I've seen unless you're buying from Speakeasy or some other "premium" DSL provider.
b. True, but not really an issue
c. Neither does Cable Modem....yet, at least in the states. I've had a sinking feeling that it's only a matter of time until we get hit with bandwidth caps though.
d. You know, I don't usually see many DSL connections that advertise 1.5M down. Usually I see 786/128 or 786/256. Maybe you live in an area where they are more generous with the bandwidth?
I read the internet for the articles.
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.
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
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