DSL or Cable what do you prefer and why?

Ye' old general discussion board. Basically, for everything that isn't covered elsewhere. Come here to shoot the breeze, shoot your mouth off, or whatever suits your fancy.
This forum is not for asking programming related questions.

Moderator: General Moderators

User avatar
Bill H
DevNet Resident
Posts: 1136
Joined: Sat Jun 01, 2002 10:16 am
Location: San Diego CA
Contact:

Post by Bill H »

I know I'm reviving a rather elderly post, but...

I have Cox Cable Internet (and tv and telephone) all of which suddenly went down on me a while ago. About five minutes it went down I decided I'd best telephone them to report it, which I did using my cell phone. After I input my home phone number I got a recording telling me they were aware of the outage in my area and had dispatched repair to deal with it. Less than 20 minutes later it was back in service.

I've had the service for several years, and this is the first time I've been aware of it being down. Of course, if this is typical, maybe it's been down more often than I think?

Anyway, as you might guess, I like the cable.
User avatar
RobertGonzalez
Site Administrator
Posts: 14293
Joined: Tue Sep 09, 2003 6:04 pm
Location: Fremont, CA, USA

Post by RobertGonzalez »

I use Pacbell/SBC/AT&T/Yahoo/whateverthehell DSL. It has always performed well for me. But I have always lived really close to the nearest control center, so my experience may be different. At the moment, my home DSL service rivals cable speeds (Comcast). Plus I only pay $14.99 a month for it. With my total phone package, I only pay a total of $54 per months for local, long distance and DSL with several custom calling features.
User avatar
dreamscape
Forum Commoner
Posts: 87
Joined: Wed Jun 08, 2005 10:06 am
Contact:

Post by dreamscape »

We have no choice out here in podunk. Well we do, but it is either dial up or DSL, which is basically no choice. I guess you could get satellite internet if you wanted, but it is more expensive and slower speeds than DSL.

Haven't had any serious problems with the DSL. Well the cheap crappy ADSL modem they gave us needs rebooted about once or twice a week, but that is because it's a cheap crappy modem.
User avatar
RobertGonzalez
Site Administrator
Posts: 14293
Joined: Tue Sep 09, 2003 6:04 pm
Location: Fremont, CA, USA

Post by RobertGonzalez »

Shhh, this will be our little secret...

e-b-a-y.
User avatar
jayshields
DevNet Resident
Posts: 1912
Joined: Mon Aug 22, 2005 12:11 pm
Location: Leeds/Manchester, England

Post by jayshields »

I just changed from cable to DSL yesterday! We had the top cable package from NTL (now Virgin) for years, and have always paid £38 a month. The only trouble I ever had was the connection would drop every so often (we're talking about once a week) and I would have to turn the computer off, turn the router and modem off, wait 10 seconds, turn them both back on and then boot up my PC. Just for the record, it was impossible to get back on the net without rebooting my PC, and yes, I tried everything.

Now I'm on DSL it seems the same speed, but the bandwidth speed tests show my connection is roughly 1/3 of what it was, but at the moment the phone line is split about 3 times and the wires amount to about 50 metres, and that's not counting the 30 metre ethernet cable I've got thrown over my roof (which has been there with the cable too). The connection has already dropped about twice, but with this new modem the DSL people gave me I can reboot the modem from 192.168.1.1, which is very handy. Also, I cannot for the life of me get my router to work with my DSL, because I think my PC needs to commicate directly with the modem, which is on 192.168.1.1 (as mentioned above), and my router hogs that IP when I'm going through that (even remapping the router to 192.168.1.2 still doesn't allow me to access my modem at 192.168.1.1).

Anyway, we only switched because of cost. It was £38.99 a month for cable, now it's £40 a month for DSL and unlimited land-line phone calls.

Just a question: I know long lines of cable can lead to data loss, but can it lead to significant data loss - which I would actually notice?
Post Reply