Up until recently my career has been in the Cable industry - specifically Cable modems in Southern California.

Let me tell you what I know briefly.

The arguement that DSL makes is not false; the cable medium is a "shared" medium much like Ethernet is "shared."

Traffic these days is not sniffable, which means that your neighbor can't see what you're doing but it is still shared.

What makes their arguement false is capacity planning that cable providers do typically makes it such that you'd never know you were on a shared medium. To be honest - unless you're on a point to point network (which even DSL isn't) you're ALWAYS on a shared medium. Dedicated circuits are expensive. The difference between cable and DSL in that is that DSL gives you some separation to their CO - then you're shared. That's physical separation but in a network diagram showing the logical network it's really no separation and it gives you zero increase in bandwidth and contention if the CO is oversubscribed (which is a term invented by the telecom industry - they do it as a rule).

Oversubscription was an idea started back in the modem based internet days. For example - you could have 1000 customers served by 700 modems. The chances that all 1000 customers would be calling at the same time was slim - but with capacity planning you could add modems as your subscriber base expanded yet still have less modems than subscribers. Far far less in fact, busy signals became a marketing ploy back then if you recall; "We have more modems!" or "No more busy signals!"

That's what DSL tried to put Cable down with - something they themselves do as a rule.

Not saying Cable companies don't over subscribe as well - they do, make no mistake they do. But in their environment with the newest deployments almost all doing VoIP they have very thin margins of error. VoIP is very sensitive to latency and congestion on networks and call quality will degrade extremely quickly if they exhist. So to combat that the over subscription rates have been drastically reduced which makes for a more robust and available network (the goal in fact).

Cable is not going to last sadly as Fiber to the home is the reality and everyone knows it. Fiber has extremely high possiblities of speed AND can carrier more independant data in different colors of light than DSL or Cable can do by changing frequency or modulation (which is how they carry more data). With Fiber you can separate the colors of light into different and distinct data pathways and while one could be completely congested (say the data line) the other line could be completely uncongested (say the voice line). At the moment these technologies are quite costly but in the next decade we'll refer to cable modems the way we refer to dial up modems.

Where DSL suffers the most I believe is in the telco mentality and the telco pricing that mentality fosters. Telcos sell tiered services (some cable companies do as well but I won't get too much into that). The CONsumer grade product you get in your home typically sucks by design. You can almost always buy a higher tier and get faster speeds but you'll also have a much lighter wallet.

Cable companies are up until recently "best effort services" companies. So they try and always have tried to give the best bang for the buck; recently Time Warner upgraded eveyone carte blanche because they could. They built the network out better and so they could and did.

If you have questions regarding cable - I'll be happy to answer them. I don't work for the Cable Co any more so I have no vested interest. Cables not really "better" it's just better done because it has to be to support all of the services. Data, Video, Voice, all high demand services.

I've had a cable modem for eight years now, and I have been tempted to go to DSL at times. My cable company, Cox, limits bandwidth bandwidth to 2.5 mbps, but every time I have measured I have gotten less then half of that. Upload is in the neighborhood of 100 kbps.

For many years I worked as a consultant from home. If I were to ever work from home again I would switch to DSL first. I always saw a huge speed drop every afternoon to the point of the internet being unusable for VPNing into my customers networks. I think all the kids must have gotten home, and started playing their online first person shooters, downloaded music, etc. This was so bad to the point that I altered my hours to work 6 hours in the morning, took the afternoon off, and then worked a couple more hours at night.

Cox also seems to do their network maintenence during the weekdays. I would see outages at least two days a week every week. Most of the time these would last less then half an hour, but sometimes they would last hours. I was told if I wanted better service I needed to upgrade to the business cable modem service for $100/month for the same speed, but supposedly they keep it up during the day. I didn't buy it though because I would still be on the same cable line, and I didn't expect anything would change.

Now since I work in an office, and I only use the cable modem at night and weekends it works pretty well for me. I only notice outages once every couple months or so.

One thing I would never use is cable phone service. Since our cable goes out so often I imagine cable phone service would too. Plus you don't have a phone when the power goes out when you are on cable. Since the average wait to get through to 911 on a cell phone is 20 minutes in my area you really need a working land line in an emergency. So for that I will stick with my local phone company. I've never had my phone go out ever.

Ed, those are extremely valid points.

The Telco network is based on a 5 9s principal. Which means your phone WILL be up 99.999% of the time. Very likely it is; since the DSL networks ride the phone lines - they typically have extremely good uptime as well.

Cable companies are a much different beast and these are issues they are still grappling with. Cable service has traditionally been "Best effort." That being the case outages and maintenance could be done on a regular basis and frankly it's cheaper to compensate you with a few days credit vs waiting to the maintenance that is needed. There is a lot of ability to separate Business class customers from residential customers based on the supporting head end hardware but when it gets down to the wire so to speak (a break or something) then that will affect all on that node.

I would be surprised if you still experience the contention that you say you used to but I've never worked for Cox cable. Just Time Warner, MEdia One, AT&T Broadband and Continental Cablevision. In those places over subscription rates were carefully monitored and mitigated as best as was able. Typically if we had an ongoing over subscription problem it wasn't "on going" because we didn't want to or couldn't afford to fix the problem. Splitting neighborhoods (nodes) required fiber work in the neighborhood which requires the approval of the local municipality on occasion. Those were our worst hangups. We had one that lasted quite a while in an OC neighborhood a while back. It was very problematic as it was also one of the richest neighborhoods which of course contributed to both ends of the problem (We don't want you tearing up our streets or hanging more fiber but we STILL want our illegal music and movie downloads).

When I left the cable industry my company was in the midst of preparations to launch VoIP. It was a tough sell on the local level for the engineers because we all knew the nature of our service, Best Effort. Best effort does not equate to having a phone line to call 911 on in an emergency. So at first it was planned to sell the lines as secondary lines, that got us around telco regulation issues. That's the rub, the cable companies are doing as much as the can as close to the line as they can so that they are NOT considered telcos and not subject to that level of regulation.

Still; Cable modems rock!

I'm just sayin.

I have DirecTV and cable internet. Cable TV cost more than DirecTV and Satellite cable is outrageously expensive. Neither variety provides package incentives. Rcecale said it best-"Once you have cable you'll never go back." It's so true. Super-fast downloads and pictures. When I click on the "More Random Pics" thread my screen loads in seconds. I even run my phone system for home and business through cable. I use Vonage. It's $25 for unlimited everything-no federal, state, county, city, village, troll under the bridge fees, taxes, etc. It's not as perfect as regular phone lines-about 80% as good.

Your Results: 4342 Kb
Sympatico: 1913 Kb
Avg. Results: 2189 Kb
Charter: 2201 Kb
Adelphia: 2503 Kb
Rogers: 3257 Kb
Comcast: 3290 Kb

Check it out: http://performance.toast.net/ and use the text and shuttle default. I have dsl at my office and use to have it at my home until I switched to cable. If you run this test a few times you can get some variable rates. I'm not sure if this has to do with cable sharing or not.

Your Results: 5368 Kb 5520 kb
Sympatico: 1913 Kb
Avg. Results: 2189 Kb
Charter: 2201 Kb
Adelphia: 2503 Kb
Rogers: 3257 Kb
Comcast: 3290 Kb

You uploaded 913,469 bytes in 14 seconds. Your upload speed is 522 kbps


Using the CNET bandwidth test, http://reviews.cnet.com/Bandwidth_meter/7004-7254_7-0.html:

3000.0 Kbps N x T1 3.0Mbps

4015.7 Kbps - You 4015.7 kbps

6000.0 Kbps T3 6.0Mbps


This is with Cox cable. I'm a DirecTV subscriber too, but I got a deal for cable internet and cable phone line.


These tests are also ran at 6:50p.m. my time, so it would be a peak internet useage time.

Sounds to me that you are on their lowest tier of service. They don't even openly advertise the 2.5mbit plan, but if you inquire about it, they'll offer it to you. It's generally their cheapest plan at around $25 per month.

They also offer a 4mbit and a 5mbit plan. The 4mbit plan limits your upload speeds to 512kb, and the 5mbit plan limits it to 768kb's.

Looking at my d/l speeds from the speed tests, I see every bit of 4mbit to even above 5mbit at times. CNET's site has heavy traffic, which is likely why I only got 4mbit from them.


I also just thought about this. If your cable modem is old, it might not be capable of faster speeds. When I ordered my internet service, I told Cox I'd supply my own modem. They told me to make sure it was 5mbit capable.... Dunno if that was just smoke and mirrors to make me buy their modem or what, but it might be something to keep in mind.

i've never had anything BUT a cable modem.....since i "went online" 7 years ago.......i'm spoiled :D

I have Qwest residential DSL here in Monument, Colorado. I have 7meg down and 896K up. I average 5-6mbps and am guaranteed 5mbps. Not bad for 34.99 per month! I have a nice demarc and patch panel, as well at cat5 installed throughout the house by the builder. My bottleneck is now the site I am accessing :)

I've been using cable ever since I was in an area with broadband. SBC claimed a "deal" in San Diego, turned out to be the cost of the two services combined, no savings.

It took 4 weeks to get DSL running and then it was slower than Cable. I know this beause I didn't want to wait for DSL, and had Time Warner install Road Runner. So, after 3 days, I called SBC back and said I didn't want DSL. THEY CHARGED ME $180 TO DISCONNECT IT!

If that were available here, I'd definately consider switching. But looking at the site, they don't claim to guaranty any speed by maybe a minimum of 3mbit. It lists that service as 3-7mbit depending on line quality.


I did another speed test and hit 6550 kb, so I'm happy with my 5-6.5mbit results, but I'd prefer to pay your lower prices ;)

Yeah Red, I used to work with the fellows who ran that network you know...great guys - they work the heck out of them too.

Cool test:

Your Results: 25011 Kb (Cablevision)
Bellsouth: 1354 Kb
Avg. Results: 1668 Kb
Charter: 1834 Kb
Adelphia: 1980 Kb
Comcast: 2146 Kb
Verizon: 2311 Kb

:p :p

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1122526054.jpg

I just did the CNET test, I got 972.1 kbps. I have SBC DSL, the "premium" service. Can't remember the advertised speed, and I think I'm paying $19.95 @ month. (Got it on the last special). Cable is way faster, but a lot more $$ where I live.

Unfortunately Cox doesn't offer different levels of service to us here in So Cal. They used to be 5 Mbps for everyone. Then as their networks got more and more saturated they throttled everyone's connections down to 2.5 Mbps. And for that privelege they charge us all $40 a month. It's great for you that you get such great throughput from Cox in Kansas, but it's not that way in Cali.

I purchased a new Cable modem about three years ago and it is 10 Mbps capable. Cox sent us a letter telling us they were throttling us down. It was one of those long letters with lots of fine print that almost nobody reads.

Went to cable from dial-up. Cable is smokin!!!

If they did that here, I'd definately be unhappy with their services too. Maybe you can find one of those 7mbit DSL lines around there.

Must be nice...I was just able to finally get DSL here a few weeks ago! And cable data -- forgetaboutit. Have/had DirecWay satellite for 3 years and it was actually extremely reliable and download speeds were quite good (approx T1 speeds). The connection latency is the big downer of the satellite-based ISP's; it rules out VPN or VOIP entirely.

Does anybody else find it ironic that in the days of the >$500K median home prices, and massively overbuilt and underutilized data infrastructure thanks to .bomb VC's, that we still don't have ubiquitous broadband?!?!?

OK -- OT and I guess I wasn't watching -- but that was post #4,000 :)