DSL vs. Cable which is better?

A

AmdBoy

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 13, 2002
Messages
312
I'm contemplating switching from dsl internet to cable. Currently I have MTS high speed dsl in winnipeg. I'm getting around 1.6mbs down and 267 kbps up. Thats with unlimited up and download limits.

If I go with shaw extreme I can get up to 7mb/s down, and a faster upload speed, although it doesn't say by how much. but I'm limited to 50 gigs up and download combined per month, which is probably more then enough.

with dsl as soon as I start uploading anything my download speeds get as bad as 56k or worse soemtimes. With cable that shouldn't happen.

this is what I've gotten so far.

Pros of dsl
supposed to be more secure. I run a router anyways though.
Its ur own private line not effected by other dsl users

Cons of dsl
downlaod speeds limited by upload speeds. more uploading less downloading.
speeds of 1.6mbs vs 7mbs for cable

Pros of cable
fast downloads and uploads.
higher download/upload speeds

cons of cable

less secure, ie shared lines
bottle necks slow it down at peak times of day to 56k apparently
less reliable connection
get booted off games more often.



am I missing naything. I don't know what to choose at the moment. and I'd liek to know some more pros/cons of each to help me make my decision
 
i cant think of anything else off hand to add. you pretty much did your homework. in the end, i think quality of service depends on your area and particular ISP. i think most all of them offer some sort grace period that allows you to at least try the service. if it isnt what you expect you can just give them a ring and cancel.
 
If you just surf, game, and occasionaly download you'll be fine with 50GB/month. If you use P2P you wont. My stats for the last 10 days: 41GB down, 23GB up. That is just my Azareus stats, not the total connection.
 
I have Charter Communication Cable internet, 3MB download, 256KB upload.

I've never had any bottlenecks. I've heard about this and was curious, but everytime I do a speed check, it's always 2.7-3.0 MB, as listed. Down to 56k? Heh, no way.

Reliablity isn't a problem for me either. It's always up. Always. 3AM, up. Midnight, up. 5AM, up. There's only been, for me, 2 times I can remember where it was down for about 10 mintues.

I've never been booted off of a game.

Overall, maybe these concerns are more prominent in other areas, but in mine, my cable is smooth sailing.
 
Qonfused said:
I have Charter Communication Cable internet, 3MB download, 256KB upload.

I've never had any bottlenecks. I've heard about this and was curious, but everytime I do a speed check, it's always 2.7-3.0 MB, as listed. Down to 56k? Heh, no way.

Reliablity isn't a problem for me either. It's always up. Always. 3AM, up. Midnight, up. 5AM, up. There's only been, for me, 2 times I can remember where it was down for about 10 mintues.

I've never been booted off of a game.

Overall, maybe these concerns are more prominent in other areas, but in mine, my cable is smooth sailing.
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Agreed. I have optimum online. I get kicked off every now and then... like once every 2 months or maybe more. It doesnt bother me that much. The speed is well worth it. Dont forget ,there is also verizon fiber optic, unless they discontinued that. Im not sure how stable/fast it is but its out there.
 
For the record, on cable, uploading DOES affect your download speed. For example, if you're uploading at the max speed, expect to not do anything else on the net.
 
sitheris said:
For the record, on cable, uploading DOES affect your download speed. For example, if you're uploading at the max speed, expect to not do anything else on the net.
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Correct. If you are uploading at the max, your latency will be terrible - dont expect to game, unless pings of >1000ms dont bother you. However while capping out the upload, you can still download at a reasonable speed. Back when I had 512kbps up/3mbit down, I could be uploading at 50kb/s (my max upload speed in practice) and still get 200kb/s down or so at the same time. Same thing now, with 1mbit up/6 or 8mbit down - not sure which. It'll be slow if you're saturating your upload limit, but it wont be nearly as slow as a 56k which the OP was complaining about.

As for bottlenecks at the peak time of the day, they exist, but they dont reduce your cable connection to the equivalent of a 56k. Would be more along the lines of if you can download at 450kb/s in the middle of the night, you might cap out around 300 or 330 or so at the peak of the day.
 
RavenD said:
Correct. If you are uploading at the max, your latency will be terrible - dont expect to game, unless pings of >1000ms dont bother you. However while capping out the upload, you can still download at a reasonable speed. Back when I had 512kbps up/3mbit down, I could be uploading at 50kb/s (my max upload speed in practice) and still get 200kb/s down or so at the same time. Same thing now, with 1mbit up/6 or 8mbit down - not sure which. It'll be slow if you're saturating your upload limit, but it wont be nearly as slow as a 56k which the OP was complaining about.

As for bottlenecks at the peak time of the day, they exist, but they dont reduce your cable connection to the equivalent of a 56k. Would be more along the lines of if you can download at 450kb/s in the middle of the night, you might cap out around 300 or 330 or so at the peak of the day.
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so what if I'm not uploading to the max? I should still be able to game right?

I'm just annoyed with my DSL service right now. the most I get for downloading is usually 250kb/s combined. and uploading is usually around 30kb/s when I upload at 30 though, my download gets reduced to like 10kb/s

I jsut want to be able to use torrents and download occasionally. I'm not a huge downloader most of the time.

and it hasn't happened in the past week, but I've been booted off the net for like sometimes as long as an hour.
 
Depends. You most likely wont be able to game while using torrents. Torrents connect to a lot of other users, and even if you're not saturating your connection bandwidth wise with them, they still tend to drastically increase your ping. If you're using something like DC++ and only have one upload and one download going, with speed limited up and down, you should be fine.
 
I wouldn't be downloading while gaming. I think I'm goign to switch to shaw extreme, I jsut got disconnected from the internet for another dman 30 minutes:mad:
 
id say a pro in my area is dsl has a fast upload, around here dsl is usually 768kb (something like that) down, and 256 up, or for more expensive dsl 1.5 down, and 768kb ( something around there) up, while cable is 4 down and only 384 (something around here) up, i have comcast cable, i love it only wish i had more upload so i could host more in games.

edit: oh yeah the most i have ever had it slow down to is about 2.7mb so it doesnt slow down that bad.
 
AmdBoy said:
cons of cable

less secure, ie shared lines
bottle necks slow it down at peak times of day to 56k apparently
less reliable connection
get booted off games more often.
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Eh?

I have Adelphia Cable and get 6.5Mbps down and 880Kbps upload and I get that no matter what time of the day. It never "slows down" at all, and has never gone down on me at all for the past 3 months. So I don't know how you think cable is "less reliable" and that you would "get booted off games more often" :confused:
 
I just got FIOS and I love it.

15 down

2 up


This beats the pants off of my cable modem!!
 
Rob said:
Eh?

I have Adelphia Cable and get 6.5Mbps down and 880Kbps upload and I get that no matter what time of the day. It never "slows down" at all, and has never gone down on me at all for the past 3 months. So I don't know how you think cable is "less reliable" and that you would "get booted off games more often" :confused:
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In highly cable populated areas this happens.

Btw, I have SBC DSL and I get 3MB down 768k up. I can usually download anywhere from 325-360kbs, and upload anywhere from 50-70kbs.
 
The problem is that no one that isn't in your area can really tell you which is better than the other. You internet usage is known only by you. Also, speeds and reliability differ from place to place and from provider to provider. The only way you will be able to tell anything is to try it out yourself or talk to people in your area that have the other one and see what they say about it.

In my area, cable is a lot better than DSL. Cable is usually a faster connection that has better overall connectivity. I haven't really done much gaming in a few months, but I've also never really had a problem with pings either. In the past, pings were rarely over 100ms if nothing else was being done at the time.

 
AmdBoy said:
less secure, ie shared lines
bottle necks slow it down at peak times of day to 56k apparently
less reliable connection
get booted off games more often.
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Those were the cons of the old cable infastructure. Most companies have upgraded their infastructure (such as comcast) so that it behaves much like DSL in some aspects.

Your speed is no longer affected by how many people are on.

I personally have comcast cable. It's 6mb downstream, 350k upstream, which translates into 770kbps download and 43kbps upload. I never get kicked out of games or lose my connection to the internet. Granted cable does vary from area to area.


SomkeRngs said:
The problem is that no one that isn't in your area can really tell you which is better than the other. You internet usage is known only by you. Also, speeds and reliability differ from place to place and from provider to provider. The only way you will be able to tell anything is to try it out yourself or talk to people in your area that have the other one and see what they say about it.
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This pretty much sums it up
 
I jsut want to be able to use torrents and download occasionally. I'm not a huge downloader most of the time.
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Shaw Cable throttles torrents. Check out the dslreports.com Shaw forum for information and general service problems. Their upload speed is 1mbit so that's pretty nice upgrade from 384kbps.

I was pretty happy with Shaw overall but I don't use torrents.

I was also very happy with MTS when I had it. A bit slower but a reliable service. You might also want to look into MTS' "Lightening Speed" upgrade. It's a 5meg service that they introduced earlier this year. I think upload is still 384kbps. No download caps though and no throttling on torrents.
 
sitheris said:
For the record, on cable, uploading DOES affect your download speed. For example, if you're uploading at the max speed, expect to not do anything else on the net.
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But isn’t that just a problem with TCP/IP in general? If your upload is saturated to the point where requests and acknowledgments can’t get through, yeah it’s going to affect your download speed. I don’t see how it would be any better on DSL though.

Not sure what it is about torrents, but most of the problems, in my experience, seem to be related to cheap hardware. I used to use a BEFCMU10 linksys cablemodem with a netgear router. There would be some pretty serious ping issues whenever I ran bittorrent, even if I was not maxing out the bandwidth. I upgraded to a Motorola SB5100 cablemodem and built a monowall router using Intel Pro/100 nics and I can hammer away at the torrents and my ping is fine. Of course monowall does some fancy stuff of its own. If I have traffic shaping on and configured, with the max upload pipe set to a little below my max to give it room to work, I can let the torrents run free and still play games just fine. My friend has a belkin router and it practically shuts down every time you run bittorrent. Bittorrent really separates the good hardware from the crap.

Before, if I ran CS:S and torrents, my ping would jump from 40 to 400+. Now it jumps from 40 to ~80, which is just fine.

I would steer clear of any ISP which sets monthly download caps. I just HATE the concept. The hype about “shared lines” with cablemodems is mostly BS. The fact is that all cable and DSL connections are shared at one point. If at that point, there is not enough bandwidth for everyone who wants it, things will slow down. The key then becomes getting an ISP that doesn’t suck, and actually resolves bottnecks in their network when they occur.
 
GotNoRice said:
Not sure what it is about torrents, but most of the problems, in my experience, seem to be related to cheap hardware. I used to use a BEFCMU10 linksys cablemodem with a netgear router. There would be some pretty serious ping issues whenever I ran bittorrent, even if I was not maxing out the bandwidth. I upgraded to a Motorola SB5100 cablemodem and built a monowall router using Intel Pro/100 nics and I can hammer away at the torrents and my ping is fine. Of course monowall does some fancy stuff of its own.
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WHORR! Ok the monowall setup is over my head, though I would invest in it if I had more room for chit to plug in. Anyway, a question u're gonna hate ... but are there a off the shelf router that can be configured to throttle up / down streams similar to your monowall NIC setup. Do the gaming routers handle this similarily without user control (ex: D-Link DGL 4300 108g/10/100/1000 Router)?

BTW : location : Martinez, CA ...
 
Are you sure the DSL speed is that low? I know bellsouth matches cable speed for price, I have the 3MB service for $45/mo. I never get dropped, always a good connection, decent to low pings in most games.

Ad for cable, I tried, wanted the 4mb/sec and such. The day it was turned on, I came home for lunch and it totally rocked. Went home that evening and couldnt even surf the web. I would have been happy to get 56k speeds at that point.

So I stuck with DSL and havent had any problems. I guess cable really does depend on your node and how many user connections it has. The one in my area sucks.
 
AmdBoy said:
cons of cable

less secure, ie shared lines
bottle necks slow it down at peak times of day to 56k apparently
less reliable connection
get booted off games more often.
Click to expand...

I've been on cable for around 7 years, and i can tell you all those cons are BS.
Less secure? Its not like i can just type in one ip higher then mine and get access to that guys computer.
Bottle necks? I download at 750k/sec(6mbit) between 6pm and midnight, thats a bit faster then 56k.
Less reliable connection? In all the years i had cable i only had to call tech support 2 or 3 times to complain about my connection.
Boots you off game, now why would it do that?

Havent used dsl, but the only gripe i have with it is slow download speeds, and dont you still have to dial up to it?
 
forcefed said:
Havent used dsl, but the only gripe i have with it is slow download speeds, and dont you still have to dial up to it?
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No.
 
I use Comcast cable here, and love it. Years ago, I said out loud that "...first provider that gets me high speed internet gets a customer...." and that was these guys. Never had a reason to consider anything else.

Other posts have hit this one on the head - which is "better" really depends on your carrier and the service that's provided in your area. You'll occasionally hear a cable person say "cable sucks" and then get the same from a DSL user....hard to draw any conclusions from that.

I really recommend talking to some folks in your area that have the services and form an opinion from their experiences. To me, there really isn't a clear winner on the technical merits alone; it's the ISP that makes or breaks the service.

FWIW - B.B.S.
 
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