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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."
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
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 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?
Gorkman
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
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
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.