<< Holy sh!t, you know how the internet works? Man that is AWESOME! You've got to be the smartest man in the world!
I understand it is not TOTALLY dedicated, but it is not shared like cable is. With DSL you have a DEDICATED line to the CO (Central Office) from there it goes to the ISP then finally the internet. You don't have a setup like cable whereas you have your whole neighborhood sharing one node before it even gets out to the net. That is why alot (not all)cable subscribers have such a fluctuation in there bandwidth. That is what I meant by a dedicated pipe. My DSL connection was ALWAYS 1.3-1.5Mbps down, 128Kbps up, no matter what time of the day it was. And in my area there were SEVERAL DSL customers, and I also had VERY little traffic when I was not on. Most cable subscribers can't say the same in a densely populated cable area. DSL doesn't share a node like cable does (yes DSL does share nodes down the line though), that is what I'm attributing all the traffic to. I'm just not used to all this traffic "infront of my door." I think I'm going to setup a packet analyzer infront of my router and check what the hell is going on out there.
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Seriously man, the Shared and private difference between them is not even worth mentioning unless you have a top=tier website that HAS TO HAVE GREAT bandwidth ALL THE TIME. Otherwise, the average cable connection is usally faster, even in densly poulated areas. It pisses me off when people associated subpar upkeeping on the part of your crappy cable company with the actually technology behind it. As it stands, cable CAN transmit a max of 40Mbit/s on the physical layer, and dsl has just rolled out 45...just NOw however. If the cable company has fiber backbones and a good node config, cable can outclass dsl instantly, and not to be biast, dsl can do the same.
I lived on a crowded node(COX) and ALWAYS got the 1.5Mb(sometime higher) that they promissed me. Now I have comcast in another area and they advertise 3.5-4.5Mbit/s and I almost always get that.it usally bottoms out at 1.5
As for security, a great deal of encrytion is used anyways, preventing all but worthy hackers from getting your IE history folder with all the porno sites YOU visited...and YOur passswords
Anyways, for secuirty, many sites use SSL encrytion that protects the physical layer between the host and client(ssl is pretty hard to crack if you know what I mean) . Then all that is left is your server, which can be vulnerable regardless of its backbone.
LArge corporations, the ones that keep secrets anyways, lease webspace from deicated hosts using massive t1s,t3,0c-3/Dc-3's, oc12,192...you get my picture....
No point in complaining about security if you leave yourself open anyways.
personally, I am setting up a website that will use minimal, but highly impotant data transfers(architectural drawings that have to be there when I need them, no financial stuff so don't bother hacking it) and I will be hosting it on cable with a 128cap but that will be enough for what is needed.
Regardless, I will be using encrytion, a hardware firewall(smoothwall Linux box), firewall on the NAT, software firewalls on each machine(XP,XP, Win2kADv server,Linux) and that will work fine for me..although I realize I can never be 100%secure ...
The key is that if I were to go to dsl, which I probably will for the static ip and higher upload speed for the same price, I would still regard the line with the same security-cautios cation that I always do