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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.
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