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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."
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.
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.
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!
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
If you could get kazaa users to use some other p2p program that isn't spyware,
You mean kazaa lite?
The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence was false.