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the issue with DSL is that the phone companies skimp (oversubscribe) on their backhaul aggregation lines ("10 pounds into a 5 pound bag syndrome"). this causes the congestion. Couple that with dynamic bandwidth throttling and your overall network performance goes up (from the telco's point of view) but the individual users performance goes down (but generally they don't know or care as the boost they see is soooo much faster than their dial up connection).
While cable as a transport mechanism, the cable companies generally don't have that issue as they work around it by rolling everything back to a central site and cache the hell out of their traffic (telco's with DSL have a harder time, 1 cache device per CO gets expensive, whereas 1 BIG cache device at central site for cable provider has the economy of scale working for them). As their aggregation lines(fiber) have a higher capacity and a wider install base than a telco's copper lines cable companies don't have the same bottleneck issues (which, as an aside, is why the multiple users on a segment issue has yet to raise its ugly head on the cable side, but will as cable begins to put more and more bandwidth demands on their network, like voice traffic).
DSL has advantages but then again so does cable. it really boils down to your needs, expectations, costs, service and availability in your area (unfortunately, both are legal monopolies and as such have probably the worst customer service cultures possible).
I, fortunately, have access to both in my area (which makes the costs slightly less...go competition!!!), and decided on cable access (good thing I did, my wife now works for the cable company, bad enuf that I have to explain the dish on my house, but DSL?).
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