dsl or cable??

[romstar]

gona get a new internet connection dsl or cable??? and if i wana network 2 computers to the connection which is easer to do it with dsl or cable????

for canadians rogers or bell?????

 

[BDawg]

If neither provider has rules against it, it 6 in one, 1/2 dozen in the other.

Both are very comparable technologies, speed-wise.

I have a DSL line and I am happy.

 

[pm]

Ask the people in the area you live in. They are very comparable.

In my town (Fort Collins, CO), cable modem is the clear winner. In SF, CA, my friends tell me that DSL is the way to go. It depends on the provider and the location.

As far as networking, they should probably both be equally easy (or hard depending on how you look at it). It depends a little on the equipment that they give you and how you want to setup the network (ICS, router, Linux IP masquerading, etc).

 

[dadx2mj]

Like they have said above a lot depends on the area you are in. Cables are usually capable of faster times but DSL give a consistant speed where cables tend to vary more. From what I have read cable is usually a easier install and has fewer bugs but either beats the hell out of dial up.

 

[Oyeve]

I would opt for DSL for two reasons: 1. constant speed 2. No security risk as with cable. Its a shared network and any semi decent hacker can get into your system. Trust me, most cable companies have really bad security.

 

[spamboy]

If you are going to try to run a server or do lots of uploading, DSL is probably better (most cable providers limit upload to 128kilobits persecond), but if you will mostly do downloading, cable is much much better. What I have found with cable is that your speed is not limited by your neghbors but by the regional gateways. For instance, in the SF Bay Area, they only have several actaully pipelines to the internet for the whole area. That means that although you technically have 10Mb/s of bandwidth, the bottleneck is on their connections. So while you used to be able to download at around 1 megabyte per sec, it has slowed as more people join in the area, down to around 500 or 600 kilobytes per second. But it is worth noting that with DSL, you can only get less than 100 kilobytes per second, even if everything was "ideally" fast, which it never is. That's also assuming that you live an area close enough to get the 700Kb(8x slower than even today's slow cable) lines and not the 384Kb lines(16x times slower). Plus in the Bay Area there are email outages and service rollout problems gallore for DSL, so for my money, cable is the no brainer.

 

[Vegito]

Well, I had DSL for 1 year, at first, the DSL was around 550K, paid for 640Kbps / 8 - around 80K Byte @ 39.99, now after 6pm, I get about 14K byte, about 2.5time faster than a 56K, switching to cable.. friends getting 300K bytes !!! 1 Meg in 4 sec!!! I dont have cable tv anyway

 

[Yoshi]

I have Ameritech DSL (Speedpath) and have been happy with it, 75Kb/s on average. It is equally easy to share cable or DSL.

 

[JasonG]

I think Cable is faster for the money.

I've been sharing my cable with two computers in WinMe (with internet connection sharing over a network) and speed is still very good.

It does depend on the provider/area though.

Verizon DSL in my area has had many complaints for lack of service and bad service.

I'm happy with AT&T Roadrunner.

Jason

 

[Sugadaddy]

I have videotron cable (rogers now) and the speed is 3.2Mbit down/128kbit up.
My friend has Sympatico HSE, and the speed is 1Mbit down/128kbit up. Depends on your area, but I think cable should be better, since Bell also limits its upload to 128kbit. Another thing is that cable is actually less expensive where I live. As for people who say that cable is down more often, it's not true in my case since it's been down once in the last year and a half.

 

[SickBeast]

i have shaw in scarboro and it kicks ass. 500kb+/sec during the day, 150-200kb/sec at night. low pings in quake 3, get used to 50 player deatmatches...i get pings of maybe 50 at the most THROUGH a proxy server

 

[SickBeast]

oh and ps cable is down more often i've had nothing but problems. the signal strength has to be just right, and whenever there's a power failure everything gets messed up. if you want reliability, like cold hard reliability, get dsl
or you could just use a winmodem and homefreeweb when the cable is out like me

 

[SickBeast]

and for people that say that cable is shared, the entire internet is shared!!

 

[SickBeast]

actually i've talked to people who have sympatico and have had nothing but problems, they say its' slow
ps if you're gonna hook up with rogers i wouldn't mind the refer-a-friend thing

 

[Mule]

I can't even imagine life without broadband. Just yesterday I was d/l Linux Mandrake at 600+kb/s on my 10MBps. It took me roughly 1.5 hours to download 1.2 GB of quality OS.

Gotta love that speed.

BTW- In my area Cable is cheaper and faster then DSL. Both have excellent service though. And many times you also get a great deal with cable tv as well with the purchase of Cable internet.

 

[fs5]

I've used both DSL and Cable but in different areas. At home (in south Bay Area, CA) I have cable. Up here in Davis, CA I have DSL (they don't offer cable services yet).

Cable is MUCH FASTER than DSL.
DSL is more stable than CABLE.

Your speed will always stay the same with DSL. But Cable at peak times (worse speed) is faster than DSL by far. I enjoy the DSL's constant speed for games, my ping never spikes. Cable spikes during peak hours. If I had a choice I'd go with cable!

 

[Raspewtin]

I'm more than 3 miles from a DSL Switching station (or whatever they call it), so in my case no question is Cable a faster, cheaper choice. You should check and see how close you as this may have an affect on your choices.


Hughes is coming out with two way satellite, so is echostar (Dish Network). However both will be about 60-70 bucks supposedly, which is a lot more than cable modem or DSL here. Fixed wireless is also in the pipeline, too.

 

[erub]

from what ive read, fixed wireless and satellite (even 2-way) are only advantageous when you can't get DSL/cable. Pings are horrendus, and the fixed wireless in Dallas (my humble home ) is the same price as DSL, and the same speed, except its both ways (my DSL is approximately 155k-170k/sec download and 16k/sec, all the time - even faster at night if at all because most of the other DSL customers of my ISP are business). BUT there is a higher ping time, and the company I talked to doesn't do residential. I personally hate AT&T (bought TCI Cable) for ripping me off on long distance, so I would see no point in going with them, even though its not available. However, Sprint's ION service Sprint ION espically intrigued me - the xt2 service includes two phone lines, 8 mbps downstream, 1 mbps upstream, 2 phone lines, caller ID, 400 minutes of long distance and other goodies. All for $119 a month, which is about $15 more than my parents are currently paying SWbell w/o Caller ID and the goodies and the cheaper DSL service. They did not want to mess up a good thing though, but you may be interested.

Woohoo 200th post!

 

[Dan]

I had GTE/Verizon DSL for just over a year. Whenever it was up the DSL was good but service and technical support were nonexistant. In late November my service was down for 4 days before I was allowed to talk to a CSR who appeared capable of holding a conversation without reading from a script. That's when I found out that there was an equipment failure on their end and that unless someone else cancelled their service the soonest they could restore my service was late December. That's also when I voted with my feet and cancelled them.

I'm scheduled to have cable modem from Adelphia installed next week. Does anyone in general but especially in the Los Angeles area, have experience with them?

 

[SickBeast]

hey mule is linux really better than win2k? cuz i'm using 2k, but if linux is faster i'll use that
i need CAD and every 3d tool under the sun, so lemme know, thanks

 

[formulav8]

If you want speed then get cable. Don't believe those people that say cable is more of a security risk. Get a firewall like what you use for every other isp and you'll be fine.

 

[pm]

Sickbeast: Linux is slightly (but noticeably) faster than Win2k in my somewhat extensive experience with chip design tools. But these are 2D only. I'm not sure how well Win2k compares with Linux for 3D apps.

 

[SickBeast]

2D only including autocad? i'm talking cad in 2d mode, elevations, floor plans, etc