DSL or Cable

The speed often depends where you live. What sort of download and upload speeds do you get with cable? If you know anybody in your area with DSL, ask them what sort of transfer rates they get and compare it to what you get.

 

Here in Fort Worth, cable is *much* faster -- at least twice as fast.

 

I guess I'm living in the age of the dinosaurs, becasue I have a 56k modem connection. But I'd love to have DSL, when I can afford it.
Not knowing anything about either, what should I know before I get either?

 

Cable tends to have higher potential speed but everyone in the neighborhood with cable shares the same bandwidth so when a lot of people are on it tends to slow down alot. With DSL you have your own line to the ISP and so you don't share bandwidth with your neighbors. With DSL, the farther you get from the Central Office, the slower your speed gets, a decent ISP won't offer the service to you if you are too far away to get reasonable speed so you don't need to worry about it being slower than dial-up. Cable is generally always on, you don't need to connect each time you want to get on the internet and so your IP address usually stays the same. DSL can be always on or if it uses a protocol such as PPPoE, you have to connect manually like with dialup (without the noise from the modem, since the connection is actually active, you just need to connect to get an IP address from you ISP which makes it seem like it isn't always on as far as the user is concerned). If the DSL is always on, your IP address will be static, if you have to connect, you will get a new address each time. Both allow you to use your phone while online though DSL often requires that you hookup filters to all your phones (usually they give you some but if you have tons of phones in your house you might need to get more). If you have more than one computer and want to share the internet connection, you'll need a router for both, however if you have DSL that uses a protocol such as PPPoE to connect and get an IP address you can just use a switch or even a hub as long as they have an uplink port for you to plug the ethernet cable from the modem (hub is cheapest but not as good, switch is a "smart hub" and thus better and often costs a little bit more but is worth it, a router can be even better but tends to cost enough more than a switch that you might wish to avoid it if you don't need it). Having mentioned ethernet, make sure your modem connects to your computer via your ethernet network card and not via USB whether you have cable or DSL. If the speed in your area is about the same you may wish to base your choice on packaged deals. If you can get a discount by getting DSL from your phone company or getting cable from your cable TV company, go for it. In my experience, I've gotten better speed from DSL than from cable but I know people who have gotten better speed with cable. DSL often has a severly crippled upload speed, you might be getting 30x the speed of a 56k modem for downloads but you could be getting only 4x the upload speed. Upload speed isn't too important unless you are sending data, such as an email, a file or playing a game online so while crippled upload really bothers me since I like to play games online every now and then, it might not be a problem for you.

In short, look for what's available at what price in your area and consider the reputation of each in your area and base your decision on that. Customer service is another thing to consider too.

 

Cable is definitely on top of it all except for the outages (Grrrr!!! ).
Slow speeds can happen also because of cookies and temp files in our caches, or traffic to the server we are trying to access, so don't buy all that hype you see on TV !!
But, having said that, cable is still the better option.

 

Thanks for your advice, some things to think about for sure.

 

For gaming your latency (ping time) is important, the lower the number the better. Cable tends to have a faster upload speed which is useful if you are hosting the game. If your ping is under 80 ms, don't bother changing, if it's over 200 ms you'll want to change. 100-200 ms isn't amazing but it's good enough to enjoy the game with out significant lag, under 100 is great. If you're getting 200K+ downloads your fine, if you're not, it's a good idea to check what sort of service is offered for the DSL. Some DSL modems only offer 1 Mbit/s maximum download speed which will get you a maximum of about 120 Kbytes/s. Other services offer 8 Mbit/s modem which will generally get you speed 3-8 times as fast if you're lucky. If you are getting 500 KB/s or more don't change. If your upload speed is 100 KB/s or more don't change because DSL tends to have a crippled upload speed, you might get several 100 Kilobytes per second downloads but your upload speed could be only 20 KB/s which is fine for the most people but not that great for gamers (though you can live with it as long as you don't host a game for more than just a few players). I get faster speed with DSL than I did with cable but my ping times are higher with DSL (I'm living in a different part of the city though so that doesn't necessarily mean anything). Basically, if you're getting good performance with cable, stick with it, otherwise it might be worth trying DSL or if you can convince a neighbor to try it, do that so you can compare the speeds that each of you gets.

 

**My Laptop Is Getting Awsome Cable Preformance**

Im a little confused about something i use a cable modem and i use a linksys wireless router to have my laptop on the same time as my dads PC (which is directlyy connected). My Dads Computer is a pentium 2 and my laptop is a pentium celeron. While my dad is getting the speed of 1.4 MBPS From comcast im Getting a whopping 17.2 MBPS why is this . THIS SPEED TEST WAS TAKIN BY BandWidth Place The Speed Test Place

 

Ya know, Kenny, I get sort of the same thing. I have my main computer hooked into a router, which is hooked to a cable modem. But the kids' computer in the other room, which is a slower computer, seems to get better download speeds than the main computer.

Let me do some research and see what I can find out....

 

Bandwidth tests are not always accurate for everybody for some reason.

 

that 17.2 was incredibble but slowly dissappeared within a hour , but even though i still seem to run faster than my dads computer while he runs at maybe 1.2 i run at 1.6 ect. i was thinkin could it have anything to do with the wireless pc card i use .

 

Maybe it reported the speed of the wireless connextion for some strange reason instead of the the speed of the internet connecition, wireless is slower than fast ethernet but is generally faster than most people's internet connection.

 

Most large ISP use caching servers, so if you look at yahoo's website the ISP sends you the page and saves a copy on there server. Then the next person (or you next time) gets the page that is in the cache and the ISP saves bandwidth. When you run a bandwidth test you are more than likly getting the test from the ISP cache server and not the original bandwidth test site.