[ale] What Do You Think About Cable vs DSL Now-a-Days?

[kirsa.thierry at gmail.com]

Hi Marc,

I have to disagree that ADSL is "Dedicated" bandwidth, if you are a 
residential customer you are oversubscribed somewhere, whether that 
oversubscription exists at the node, at the headend, or even higher, it will 
exist simply because it's more lucrative to sell people bandwidth that does 
not exist than to sell people bandwidth that does exist, and there are not 
enough people that know the difference or care.

I have to say that my experience with At&t in the Gwinnett area was pretty 
poor, I was not impressed with the throughput or the pingtimes, or how often 
my connection went down.

I was also not impressed when At&t told me that my Linux desktop does not 
support the internet and I would have to use windows or mac to run the set-up 
utility in order to make a username/password to connect, or pay them 100$ to 
get a tech out here to do it for me on their windows laptop, when I informed 
them that my desktop fully supports TCP/IP, they asked me what a t.c.p. 
was,...

I currently use Comcast and while they are a big evil corporation just like 
At&t, my pingrates are extremely low and my bandwidth is plenty stable in my 
opinion, but YMMV with this, you might be on a worse node.

If you live in an IFITL neighborhood, just don't use it, it's super-duper 
crippled, you are sharing a 10base-t half-duplex connection with 5-10 
neighbors, you will die in packet-loss hell, I was in the process of 
switching to Atlantic Nexus but canceled when I learned I was in an IFITL 
neighborhood, which is disappointing because I hear Atlantic Nexus is real 
good.

if you do go with ADSL I would highly recommend going with a company like 
Atlantic  nexus over a corporation like At&t, it feels nice to be treated 
like a human being if it can be helped, and Atlantic Nexus never told me my 
computer doesn't support the internet, which feels real good.

I may be bias because I'm a cable fan-girl, the telco technology is way 
inferior in many places imho, especially with DOCSIS3.0 rolling out, At&t is 
just now laying their fiber to the node and bragging about it in my area, big 
deal, many cableco's have had that for years.

Sincerely,
Kirsa Thierry




On Friday 24 April 2009 07:08:30 Marc Ferguson wrote:
> Hey Fellas,
>
> You're all familiar with the old war between Cable and ADSL.  I'd like to
> know if you guys have an opinion on it today? We currently have Cable (with
> Comcast) and we can get a better package deal with AT&T, but we'll switch
> back to ADSL.  Both offer 6 Mbps (downstream), but we know that ADSL is a
> private line so you're guaranteed that amount.  Has the game changed over
> the years?
>
> When I was with ADSL, I was an ADSL-fanboy - when I switched to Cable, I
> was a Cable-fanboy... so now I'm on the ropes. Facts are facts and it
> sounds like the private ADSL connection is better rather than a hit-or-miss
> with Cable.  Thanks.