cable or DSL?

[PeteS99]

although i live in an affluent area in NJ, in a larger city... broadband is still far out of reach. but they keep promising it.. IF cable happens to arrive before DSL... would it be worth getting? there is no real installation needed... and its cheaper. any thoughts?

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i love natural selection.

See the world with Semester at Sea:
http://go.to/sas/

[LawyerRon]

Pete, I have friends on cable and they say it works great. The only downside with cable is that you're basically on a LAN and the more people on your cable, the slower you'll surf. In short, you share bandwidth with people on your node.

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"To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves"

[reboot]

Here's an excerpt from Les Jones of 56k.com:

quote:

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The inevitable "cable modem gets slower" story, with a twist
As the months went by and more of my neighbors signed up, the speed degraded. Popular accounts of cable modems mention that congestion will occur as more people sign on, because everyone is using the same network. This turns out to be something of a red herring, because the cable company can always split the network into multiple segments.

In my case, the cable network wasn't even close to being overwhelmed. The cable company readily admitted that the congestion was on the network links. The cable company had a fat pipe - a T3 - to the Internet. Unfortunately, that T3 was in a different county. To get to the T3, my data had to pass through a much skinnier pipe - a T1 - that connected the two counties.

With the T1 overloaded, download speeds fell to 56K modem scale in the evenings, assuming I could get anywhere. Network outages sometimes lasted for hours. I could still get decent speeds during the day, but it was clear that the network couldn't stand many more users. This went on for two months, and I considered quitting and going back to ISDN.

The cable company added another T1 in October, and the system is mostly back to its old self, though bandwidth still falls off in the evening. The lesson in this is that a modem is only as good as the network behind it, and that cable modem ISPs are bound by the same rules as other ISPs when it comes time to add more bandwidth to their networks.

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Personally, I have had only the slightest slowdown in service in the evenings. Maybe 5kbps difference, which at over 100kbps amounts to less than 5%. Gee, it took me 11 seconds to get that MP3 instead of 10! :P

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Who needs a life?, I have internet!
Cheers, Jim
Jim & Sue's Free Files | Jims Modems

[RedVR6]

Keep your fingers crossed.

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DBK
'95 GLX - Work in Progress
'99 Homemade Celery Box

http://drink.to/saltys/

[PeteS99]

thanks guys! one of these days...