Originally posted by sparkleytone
i'll tell ya this. i would choose cable 6 days a week and twice on sunday if you can get it instead of DSL. most people, myself included, have a hard enough time trusting their phone lines to operate their PHONES, much less a highbandwidth internet connection. RJ11 is crap.
Yea...
I have Verizon DSL and am now trying out Comcast Cable Internet as well. Indeed, Comcast gives me 1100Kbps or so downstream in the modem test. Very acceptable (and faster than what I see from DukeStreet's chart). <b>BUT...</b>
The connection is sporadic. First, when I look at NetMonitor's (OS X app) graph of what's happening through my ethernet port on DSL it is a solid graph of a sustained speed for, say, a file sitting at about 60K/sec (480Kbps). With cable hooked up, I get a wild fluctiation, many times a second from speeds of 20K/sec to 300K/sec averaging out the zig-zag at about 150K/sec. And 150K/sec is about what you'd expect. Seems odd to me, but apparently has to do with speed throttling (packets get tossed when you exceed a cap, then it resends, etc. giving you the proper average.) But that's just odd, not problematic...
What's problematic is the dropouts. You don't notice it with the web or FTP, etc. But when I play Quake 3 I get slightly better pingtimes than on DSL (yay!) but every minute, there is at least one and more likely 2-4 "connection interrupted" pauses of about 2-4 seconds. Some lasting for 20-30 seconds. Some longer, but rare. This does not happen w/ DSL. There is not a single server out there that I connect to where this does not happen on cable. It's incredibly annoying.
I am not a Quake 3 or die kind of guy, but it represents a problem. I do like on-line gaming and Comcast's implementation is clearly not up to the task, despite it being superior to DSL when it's not experiencing a connection interrupted moment. Also a negative is the 1GB/month cap on usenet (newsgroup) usage. For $12 / mo additional you get up to 6GB/mo. (They go through GigaNews). To illustrate, I dl'ed 60GB worth of data in February from the usenet. Clearly I'd like to not have to pay additional for that. Verizon has unlimited usenet access, presently.
So...I am going to drop cable--I tried it, but not acceptable. I was going to stick with Verizon (I'm grandfathered in at $39.95/mo with them and a static IP) but now it seems EarthLink might be faster (tho $10 more/month). We'll see...
blakespot