OT: DSL Vs. Cable

[Robin Laing]

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