Service from either may differ on the location. Cable needs to be segmented or it runs into load problems at certain times of the day. I had Cable and moved to DSL. During the change over to DSL, I could connect to my Cable providers servers faster via DSL than Cable. Even talking to the system admin was a waste of time.
My experience is DSL is much more reliable.
Mileage may vary. :)
Indeed, up in this neck of the woods (New England), cable is much faster than DSL. Most cable companies up here are providing 3-5Mbps on home connections. And while Robin is right, they are not anywhere's near that speed during the day, they are at night after most of your neighbors have gone to bed. B^)
I have found that DSL cannot also guarentee their listed speed either. The closer you are to the switch (or a repeater), the better the actual speed is. The further away, the connection slows down.
So, you have 2 competing standards that cannot guarentee their advertised speeds. I have found that I'd rather have the potentially faster connection (for the same price) for those times when it actually does get to be faster. B^)
I am also blest with a current cable connection that perports to be 7Mbps and will soon rise to 10Mbps (thou I rarely see download speeds above 400KBps, that's 4Mbps, that's still faster than Verizon DSL provides at best). Verizon is cutting DSL prices in New England to try and stay competitive with the cable companies, even though their speeds are less. Competition, at its finest! Cable is getting faster, DSL is getting cheaper!
Also, be warned, if your cable company does not know what it is doing (my seems to), cable could be less reliable than DSL. My cable company happens to also own a number of dialup ISPs (Ultranet, Errols, etc) so I guess I am lucky.
-- Kevin J. Cummings kjchome@xxxxxxx cummings@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx cummings@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
