2007 DSL vs Cable modem thread

I laugh as well! I once called Time Warner, and they made me wait 20 days for a tech to come to my place. By then I had figured out what the problem was, but still kept the appointment to see if they would actually show up after 20 days. They did. Yay!

 

Bottom line...with DSL you get WAY more consistency with your speeds. And, it's cheaper. Personally, I've never had a problem with their support. But, then again, I haven't had to use them either.

 

DSL has always worked great for me. And it's cheaper.

End of story.

 

i've always seemed to have connection problems with DSL. althought that was about 1.5 years ago. maybe they've fixed their problems. cable has been excellent for me. the price just sux.

 

I have had RR for 4 years. I haven't had a single problem with it. I got it the day it was available in my neighborhood. Then about a year ago they quit charging me for it.

 

If your loop length is short enough to qualify for a 6 mpbs line, then go for it. You shouldn't have any of those signal degradation issues that alot of subscribers have when living too far from the Central Office/Remote Terminal.

 

Are you talking about megabits or megabytes? Some DSL companies purposefully like to use megabits because it can confuse the consumer. 8 bits=1 byte

If you're talking about bytes, unless you live like right next door to the phone company, I cannot believe you can achieve those kinds of speeds on traditional copper phone lines unless there has been humongous achievements that I'm not aware of. the promised download speeds are probably 375k-750k/sec sepending on how far you live from your local phone switch place.

 

Maybe DSL is "more consistent"; maybe not. I've had no problem with RR. Just remember this: DSL is the tortoise, RR is the hare. The slowdown in speed may be hard to deal with. I could not go back to DSL.

 

Does anyone here have Telephone television through fiber optical lines offered by phone companies?

 

Semi-related question. My Roadrunner connection only says 10 MBPS. When I do the speed test thing, the speed is around the DLS speed area. Also, I'm only getting 25K-35K/second on my file downloads. Could this be because I only had analog cable and not digital? Could it be my network card? Modem? Maybe it's something outside? I don't want to call up TW and have them send out a guy to fix something that's not messed up. My computer is about four years old, but it's still somewhat decent. It's a P4 with 512 megs of RAM, I think. I don't do any real resource intensive stuff like gaming, so I think the computer specs are fine. Is memory tied in with connection speed?

Thanks for any help...

 

I have the 3-6 Mbps DSL plan from AT&T. I get a constant 4.9 Mbps on my line.

 

The signal that travels on the cable is always analog. The signal while transmitting from the cable modem to the the reciever the signal in analog. It then gets converted to a digital signal using some signal processing on both ends. If you use it during peak times it might run slow. Also you might have a weak signal. You might need a drop amplifier to fix this.

 

For the most part, your computer should not have any correlation to download speed unless you have a piece of crap that can't handle that much data coming in at a high speed. a P4 with 512MB is sufficient. Your cable connection is shared by the people in your neighborhood, so if your speed is low, it is probably because other ppl are hogging the bandwidth. Try runnign the test at a less busy time, say round 10 or 11 and the speed will probably go up. 9 times out of 10, thjis isi usually the problem. Sometimes it could be your network card, but very very rarely.

 

The bottom line is that DSL is going to be an obsolete technology in a couple years when people NEED more bandwith for all of the media coming from the internet. Cable might have the pipe, but the real winner will be FIOS, which is fiber to the house.

The problem with DSL is that the data cable it comes over is a phone line. We're talking about a data cable that was designed decades ago that can't even carry 10mbs a second. From what I've read, streaming HD will need 20-30mbs to be viable. DSL will never do that over standard pbx (phone) lines. DSL is simply not fast enough, and they are squeezing everything they can out of their equipment as it is. Cable has a ways to go in terms of speed increase. In areas outside of Houston, you can get 20mbs over cable.

Big Sherv and A-Train (and anyone else): 90% of cable modem issues are the lines in your house and/or to the cable tap on the main line. Either there are too many splitters or the line is old, rotted, or substandard. I've never had a cable modem die, BTW.

Here's a trick- cancel your service and sign up again under a different name. Tell them that you need new wiring installed. Sometimes it's free, sometimes it costs $50-100, but it's worth it. They will run a line directly to your cable modem, and directly to the tap.

That 10mbs you are seeing is the max speed of your network card. It has nothing to do with your cable modem speed. Like I said above, it sounds like your wiring is old. Have 'em run new lines.

I honestly think that this is a myth, in terms of seeing HUGE decreases, unless you live in geek/pirate central and most people on your node are downloading files nonstop.

 

To make it simple

Speed: TW > DSL

Price: DSL > TW

I do the following.. Have a wired and wireless network, d/l music, movies, play online games, play streaming music and videos, from two or three computer at a time... TW at the moment is the only one that can give me the speed I need..

Now if your just a casual surfer then go with DSL....

I've had both and I can't tell you enough how frustrating it is to play online games and have my wife d/l something and it just ruins my experience....

 

The 10mbps you see is just the connection speed between your network card and your cable modem.

 

Well for my cable company here in Indiana they are advertising their speed as 10mbps.