Kevin J. Cummings wrote:
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.
On the DSL speed and line issue. This is very true. My provider tests the lines before accepting an application. I am lucky, I can almost throw a stone at the Central Office.
My DSL is very reliable and dependable.
A word of caution, some ISP's offer DSL connections but don't have the backend to support their customer base and have a bottleneck at their headend. This goes for Cable ISP's as well. This is why I mentioned talking to your neighbors. I don't know what it is like in the US but here we have money back agreements.
As to administration of Cable ISP's. Ours was a nightmare when I was with them. Support for home users was during normal business hours. They had problems that I could debug and let them know about. On a funny side, some months after leaving the local cable company, the system admin became my next door neighbor. He did apologize and say I was right that they had problems. :)
-- Robin Laing
