Posted: 10/26/2008 8:15:37 PM EDT
| I have cable internet now, "Road Runner Light" through Brighthouse cable but I am moving to a place where there is no cable so I signed up for ATT's DSL service. How much slower is DSL than cable? Anyone know? |
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Quoted: I have cable internet now, "Road Runner Light" through Brighthouse cable but I am moving to a place where there is no cable so I signed up for ATT's DSL service. How much slower is DSL than cable? Anyone know? You won't notice the difference unless you are downloading very large files like video. |
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Completely depends on the area and provider. There are noticeable differences with any DSL provider if you are closer to the 'location' of the provider than if you were further away. I have a neighbor that has Qwest DSL, is directly comparable to my cable, pretty good speed, and my friend, who lives about 10 miles away - going away from the city - who has Qwest DSL and it's slower than dirt. Their network takes a dump on them if more than one machine (desktop, laptops, Xbox 360) is using it at once. |
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Depends on how far you are from the central office. We run into a lot of cases at work where a customer was added to DSL service and over time while the service worked great, all of the sudden the service was deemed TNF or technically not feasible. The reason behind this is due to the fact that the DSL provider added more customers to the circuit, which in turn screwed over the last customer because they were the furthest away from the CO. AT&T U-Verse is supposed to be really good. It operates off of a technology called "FTTC" or Fiber-To-The-Curb. AT&T runs fiber to boxes through out the neighborhood and from there it goes to copper which then leads to the house. Top speed is 10Mbps over 1.5 Mbps upstream. Then you've got Verizon FIOS, Fixed Wireless and so on. Honestly I prefer cable in my area because it is faster. Only downside is that my provider has bandwidth caps in place from 4PM to 12AM. If I pull over 3.6-3.8GB downstream they throttled back my service until 12AM, then it resets. |
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Two things I like about ATT DSL. 1. They arent owned by a Time Warner, so IMO they generally dont give a shit about the fact that you are downloading movies and TV shows. 2. No bandwidth caps. Also are you going to get a land line with your DSL, or are you getting a "dry loop" DSL? If you are getting a landline but not going to be using it much since you primarily use a cell phone then ask if they can give you a metered phone line instead. I know here in Texas we can get a metered line, it saves me about 10 bucks a month, incoming calls are free, outgoing you get 25 free and then its 8 cents a call after that (you arent charged by minute just by call). |
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Quoted: Quoted: I have cable internet now, "Road Runner Light" through Brighthouse cable but I am moving to a place where there is no cable so I signed up for ATT's DSL service. How much slower is DSL than cable? Anyone know? You won't notice the difference unless you are downloading very large files like video. exactly. i prefer DSL. it just depends on the scenario |
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i had 6mb Time Warrner when they were in houston, then they switched to Comcast. Comcast couldn't pull their heads out of their asses long enough to fix my internet. so i switched to ATT DSL. i'm paying for 6mb but normaly test at 4.5mb. (its got to be the distance from the hub) i realy don't notice a difference and i download torrents and play COD4 on the xbox all the time. i'd love to go back to Comcast if they can pull their heads out of their ass long enough to fix their internet. |
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I have DSL here in my house, after having Cable in our apt. we lived in when we first moved out here. DSL is slightly slower, but not by much. I've had less problems with the DSL than the cable, but if cable were available here, I might have to try it out; mainly for online gaming. |
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cable was sketchy in my apartment, and there's not much upgrading you can do about that, so I went DSL. I must be close to a switch or something because I can pull about 360Kb/s off rapidshare when downloading stuff.
Though I am jealous of my buddy and his FIOS... 
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DSL is an inherently buggier and less error-tolerant setup. It's also inherently slower than cable in most applications.
That doesn't mean it's going to suck. It might be fine for 99% of your use. What I would say though is that you should make sure that you have good high speed access before you let the installer off the hook. If you're too far from the CO or at the end of some really nasty voice lines, the speed could be worse than dialup and it won't magically get better. Once it's in and installed and running well though, you likely won't even notice too much difference. |
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This is the same as Mac vs PC or Ar vs Ak.
Cable shares bandwidth on both the line and the backbone (connection to the fiber networks). DSL shares bandwidth only on the fiber networks. If you have a contract for a certain speed and aren't getting it, chances are you should be contacting your phone company to have them Condition the line to make sure there aren't problems on it. (Technical terms we use for problems: Load coils, opens, grounds, shorts, crosses, etc..) DSL runs on the same path as your phone line (but at a much higher frequency) so it all boils down to how clean and clear that line is. Furthermore, DSL requires (so does cable but it is a bit more lax due to how much juice they push out the line already) a certain proximity to the "Central Office" or a Fiber Node fed off of your CO so you can get maximum benefit. If you live 16k feet from your CO/Node, then your service won't be as strong as if you lived right across the street. Which is better? Both have their positives and negatives and which one is better depends on your location location location, not to mention what you intend on using it for, gaming vs normal usage. My advice? Depends on your use. Plan on online gaming or file sharing? Find out the location of the Central Office serving your city (or sometimes neighborhood if you live in a large city like Chicago that has multiple CO's), also find out if your neighborhood is being serviced by a Fiber Node which would be (for all intents and purposes of this discussion) the same as a CO for DSL purposes. If you are less than 2 miles from the Central Office or a Fiber Node services your neighborhood, you should do really well with DSL. If you are >10k feet, then your dsl signal will be weaker and you will be limited on the amount of bandwidth you can purchase and you may want to check out Cable (that's if you want internet speeds used for gaming). Normal use: pretty much any will work (well.. not 56k dial up!) as long as you aren't too far from either the Cable Node or CO/Fiber Node. Just my .02 as a professional in the field. Oh and I use the term professional very lightly! |
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DSL is an inherently buggier and less error-tolerant setup. It's also inherently slower than cable in most applications. That doesn't mean it's going to suck. It might be fine for 99% of your use. What I would say though is that you should make sure that you have good high speed access before you let the installer off the hook. If you're too far from the CO or at the end of some really nasty voice lines, the speed could be worse than dialup and it won't magically get better. Once it's in and installed and running well though, you likely won't even notice too much difference. I have to disagree with your first two sentences as I have seen that as the case with both DSL and Cable. It depends on your service provider, their policies, the condition of your lines, the applications you are running, the power of your computer.... too many variables to attribute problems to DSL alone.. so I don't buy your premise. You can find people on both sides of the spectrum claiming that DSL sucks or Cable sucks, when it may in fact have nothing to do with either or maybe both had issues. |
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Where does the stuff you get with Dish/DirectTV come in? That's all that some people can get (people that live out in the sticks), although I don't think it's very good for online gaming (which I do), but I could be wrong. Used to be (I think it's changed now) that you had to have a phone line connected for Satellite internet for the uploads but could download pretty fast. With gaming, your upload speeds matter more than your dl speeds. I will say this: Does it do the things you need it for? Connected for email/web surfing? Hardcore Gaming? If it does, then that's all that matters. If it doesn't then you need to figure something new out. If you are too far out in the boonies/sticks, until they get a fiber node in your area you might be stuck with plain old dial up at a rate significantly less than 56k... unless you check into getting an ISDN line - which can be more expensive than it's worth. |
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Oh and as for my credentials:
I am an AT&T Central Office Technician in the People's Republic of Illinois. I work on everything from 56/64k lines, atm & lottery circuits, t1's, t3's, oc3's, oc12's, oc48's, oc192's... DSL (ADSL, Dry Loops), POTS lines, 9-1-1 Trunks. The biggest customer out of my office is John Deere which is huge in my area. Terms/Definitions: (not exact because I don't need to bore you with tech stuff) Dial up = 56Kbps (kilobytes per second) T1 = 1.544 Mbps (megabytes per second) T3 = ~ 44 Mbps OC3 - Optical Carrier (Fiber Optics - pretty much same as a T3) OC12 = 12 T3's OC48 = 48 T3's OC192 = 192 T3's running at ~ 8 Gigs per second. Dry Loop = DSL service without Dial Tone POTS = Plain Old Telephone Service (Dial Tone) ATM/Lottery - no definition required.. self explanatory ... |
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Cable FTW +1 I have cable and DSL doesn't even compare to a fraction of my speed. Last Result:
Download Speed: 17566 kbps (2195.8 KB/sec transfer rate) Upload Speed: 3135 kbps (391.9 KB/sec transfer rate) So you have ~ 2 Mbps Download and 400k Upload... Nothing spectacular, again remember that if you lived close enough to the Central Office, your speeds with DSL would easily be comparible if not much better depending on if you lived closer to the Cable company as well. If you are about the same distance, your bandwidtch would be comparible. Want to know why? The dirty little secret? The cable company buys bandwidth from the Phone Company! They hook their equipment up to the phone company's "backbone," which gives them a connection to the fiber pipeline... er go the magical cloud that is known as the Internet. I can easily hit 6Meg downloads and 762k Uploads but I live ~ 4 blocks from the CO serving my house. |
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Cable... hahaha
Thats what I dig up out of the ground every time I show up with a trencher or backhoe because the asshole company won't locate their shit. .... Oh wait... you can get broadband over it?! Not here you can't... DSL is the only way to go... of course, I might be a bit biased anyways[img='middle']http://www.ar15.com/images/smilies/icon_smile_wink.gif[/img] |
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Im running Optimum Online through Cablevision in Morris County NJ.
On my cable internet hookup threw them I just measured via speedtest.net: 13901 kb/s download 1925 kb/s upload Works pretty damn well for me. ETA: Tested again just to be sure. Second time around i measured: 14088 kb/s download 1920 kb/s upload |
| I have DSL for a couple of reasons. First, it's $25 a month cheaper than cable. It is slower than the local cable service by a good margin, but it is more than adequate for my purposes (even online gaming, watching videos, etc). Second, I would MUCH rather give my money to Verizon than to Time Warner... I had nothing but problems with that company in my prior dealings. |
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Im running Optimum Online through Cablevision in Morris County NJ. On my cable internet hookup threw them I just measured via speedtest.net: 13901 kb/s download 1925 kb/s upload Works pretty damn well for me. ETA: Tested again just to be sure. Second time around i measured: 14088 kb/s download 1920 kb/s upload That's not your download/upload speed, that's how much you downloaded/uploaded. How long did the test last? Divide your numbers by the number of seconds your test lasted.. this will tell you your "transfer rate." |
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Im running Optimum Online through Cablevision in Morris County NJ. On my cable internet hookup threw them I just measured via speedtest.net: 13901 kb/s download 1925 kb/s upload Works pretty damn well for me. ETA: Tested again just to be sure. Second time around i measured: 14088 kb/s download 1920 kb/s upload That's not your download/upload speed, that's how much you downloaded/uploaded. How long did the test last? Divide your numbers by the number of seconds your test lasted.. this will tell you your "transfer rate." Forgive me if im wrong but doesn't the kb/s indicate that it was down loading or uploading that amount of data per second and therefore = transfer rate? Please correct me if im wrong. |
| The test shot right up to that download speed and hoverd around that speed with slight up and down variations for the duration of the test. The download test took a few seconds to reach that rate and then hung at that rate with minor up and down variations for the duration of the test. |
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Cable FTW +1 I have cable and DSL doesn't even compare to a fraction of my speed. Last Result:
Download Speed: 17566 kbps (2195.8 KB/sec transfer rate) Upload Speed: 3135 kbps (391.9 KB/sec transfer rate) So you have ~ 2 Mbps Download and 400k Upload... Nothing spectacular, again remember that if you lived close enough to the Central Office, your speeds with DSL would easily be comparible if not much better depending on if you lived closer to the Cable company as well. If you are about the same distance, your bandwidtch would be comparible. Want to know why? The dirty little secret? The cable company buys bandwidth from the Phone Company! They hook their equipment up to the phone company's "backbone," which gives them a connection to the fiber pipeline... er go the magical cloud that is known as the Internet. I can easily hit 6Meg downloads and 762k Uploads but I live ~ 4 blocks from the CO serving my house. your math is wrong... also I do not have 2 mbps download... I have 17.566 Mbps you are confusing bits and bytes. divide 17.566 by eight and it will give you my MB/sec which is 2.196MB/second. cable runs fiber to the nodes down here, then copper to the end user. they do not share "backbones" leave the redistribution of wealth cables to Illinois... [img='middle']http://www.ar15.com/images/smilies/icon_smile_wink.gif[/img] besides, speeds are generally tested in megabits not megabytes. you should know that. 
try testing your speeds here, then post a link of your speeds. eta* this is also wrong: Dial up = 56Kbps (kilobytes per second)
T1 = 1.544 Mbps (megabytes per second) T3 = ~ 44 Mbps OC3 - Optical Carrier (Fiber Optics - pretty much same as a T3) OC12 = 12 T3's OC48 = 48 T3's OC192 = 192 T3's running at ~ 8 Gigs per second. Dry Loop = DSL service without Dial Tone POTS = Plain Old Telephone Service (Dial Tone) ATM/Lottery - no definition required.. self explanatory ... again. those should be kiloBITS |
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Im running Optimum Online through Cablevision in Morris County NJ. On my cable internet hookup threw them I just measured via speedtest.net: 13901 kb/s download 1925 kb/s upload Works pretty damn well for me. ETA: Tested again just to be sure. Second time around i measured: 14088 kb/s download 1920 kb/s upload That's not your download/upload speed, that's how much you downloaded/uploaded. How long did the test last? Divide your numbers by the number of seconds your test lasted.. this will tell you your "transfer rate." Forgive me if im wrong but doesn't the kb/s indicate that it was down loading or uploading that amount of data per second and therefore = transfer rate? Please correct me if im wrong. You are telling me that your DL speed is 13 Meg and your upload speed is 1.4 meg.... which is why I suspect it highly. Find a 13 Meg file online somewhere and download it... if you download it in 1 second.. then you do have a 13M download speed.. Which I highly and honestly doubt unless you are on a company network. Remember that companies use T1's (mostly unless they have servers etc) and a T1 is 1.544 Mb/s both ways (up and down). More useless information for people to know/understand: Eng Notation, there's an easy method to remember it that I learned while in the Navy. Thank God My Kinky mother understands nuclear power (notice the capitalized letters) Tera (T) 10^12 Giga (G) 10^9 Mega (M) 10^6 Kilo (K) 10^3 milli (m) 10^-3 micro (u) 10^-6 nano (n) 10^-9 pico (p) 10^-12 |
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Cable FTW +1 I have cable and DSL doesn't even compare to a fraction of my speed. Last Result:
Download Speed: 17566 kbps (2195.8 KB/sec transfer rate) Upload Speed: 3135 kbps (391.9 KB/sec transfer rate) So you have ~ 2 Mbps Download and 400k Upload... Nothing spectacular, again remember that if you lived close enough to the Central Office, your speeds with DSL would easily be comparible if not much better depending on if you lived closer to the Cable company as well. If you are about the same distance, your bandwidtch would be comparible. Want to know why? The dirty little secret? The cable company buys bandwidth from the Phone Company! They hook their equipment up to the phone company's "backbone," which gives them a connection to the fiber pipeline... er go the magical cloud that is known as the Internet. I can easily hit 6Meg downloads and 762k Uploads but I live ~ 4 blocks from the CO serving my house. your math is wrong... also I do not have 2 mbps download... I have 17.566 Mbps you are confusing bits and bytes. divide 17.566 by eight and it will give you my MB/sec which is 2.196MB/second. cable runs fiber to the nodes down here, then copper to the end user. they do not share "backbones" leave the redistribution of wealth cables to Illinois... 
besides, speeds are generally tested in megabits not megabytes. you should know that. http://www.speedtest.net/result/347342446.png" target="_blank">http://www.speedtest.net/result/347342446.png</a> try testing your speeds here, then post a link of your speeds. eta* this is also wrong: Dial up = 56Kbps (kilobytes per second)
T1 = 1.544 Mbps (megabytes per second) T3 = ~ 44 Mbps OC3 - Optical Carrier (Fiber Optics - pretty much same as a T3) OC12 = 12 T3's OC48 = 48 T3's OC192 = 192 T3's running at ~ 8 Gigs per second. Dry Loop = DSL service without Dial Tone POTS = Plain Old Telephone Service (Dial Tone) ATM/Lottery - no definition required.. self explanatory again. those should be kiloBITS I apologize, i was talking bits.. but typed bytes.. which is why we were actually coming up with the same numbers but I musta had my brain screwed on backwards. |
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Im running Optimum Online through Cablevision in Morris County NJ. On my cable internet hookup threw them I just measured via speedtest.net: 13901 kb/s download 1925 kb/s upload Works pretty damn well for me. ETA: Tested again just to be sure. Second time around i measured: 14088 kb/s download 1920 kb/s upload That's not your download/upload speed, that's how much you downloaded/uploaded. How long did the test last? Divide your numbers by the number of seconds your test lasted.. this will tell you your "transfer rate." Forgive me if im wrong but doesn't the kb/s indicate that it was down loading or uploading that amount of data per second and therefore = transfer rate? Please correct me if im wrong. You are telling me that your DL speed is 13 Meg and your upload speed is 1.4 meg.... which is why I suspect it highly. Find a 13 Meg file online somewhere and download it... if you download it in 1 second.. then you do have a 13M download speed.. Which I highly and honestly doubt unless you are on a company network. Remember that companies use T1's (mostly unless they have servers etc) and a T1 is 1.544 Mb/s both ways (up and down). More useless information for people to know/understand: Eng Notation, there's an easy method to remember it that I learned while in the Navy. Thank God My Kinky mother understands nuclear power (notice the capitalized letters) Tera (T) 10^12 Giga (G) 10^9 Mega (M) 10^6 Kilo (K) 10^3 milli (m) 10^-3 micro (u) 10^-6 nano (n) 10^-9 pico (p) 10^-12 you keep using misleading words. A "mega" only means "one million" it is just a prefix. then you say "Meg". a mega bit? or a mega BYTE. my speed as I stated before is in mbps. which is megabits. speed is tested in megabits. megabytes are more commonly used for data. I posted a verifiable speed test of my results, and my ISP and location are listed there. I'd like to see what compares here Cable VS DSL and see what the average user gets. try it out. just click on the speed test. ETA* I read what you posted, and it was a typo, no problem. 
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DSL has issues with distance to the central office of the phone company.
Cable has issues with available bandwidth when a lot of users are on at the same time. The fiber systems have the same issues as cable for loading. Satellite (Hughes net is one) has issues with weather. Heavy rain can cause noise and dropouts, and wind can actually cause antennas to shake if they are not well installed and secured. |
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Cable can be full of win... I read last year some time that a Finnish (or was it Norwegian?) company figured out how to get 100Mbps over coax cable.
Comcast is about to offer 50Mbps service in a few markets. Time Warner, where I am, is up to 12Mbps, although on my standard service, I get around 6. I think once you get over a few Mbps, unless you're downloading huge shit, you simply won't see any difference. Casual browsing just doesn't need much bandwidth. |
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cable fucking sucks! its a shared connection! so all the porn hounds on your block on at 6:00pm till midnight are going to eat all you bandwith.
Ive had both and i love my 10meg DLS connection! Not shared at street level.. I see bursts up to 15 meg at times.. cable i was luckly to get 1 meg on a good day.. fuck cable! |
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Only downside is that my provider has bandwidth caps in place from 4PM to 12AM. If I pull over 3.6-3.8GB downstream they throttled back my service until 12AM, then it resets. thats not a bandwidth cap.. thats a saturation of lines happens all the time here.. |
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cable fucking sucks! its a shared connection! so all the porn hounds on your block on at 6:00pm till midnight are going to eat all you bandwith. Ive had both and i love my 10meg DLS connection! Not shared at street level.. I see bursts up to 15 meg at times.. cable i was luckly to get 1 meg on a good day.. fuck cable! Wrong, but what ever happens in you world |
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cable fucking sucks! its a shared connection! so all the porn hounds on your block on at 6:00pm till midnight are going to eat all you bandwith. Ive had both and i love my 10meg DLS connection! Not shared at street level.. I see bursts up to 15 meg at times.. cable i was luckly to get 1 meg on a good day.. fuck cable! Wrong, but what ever happens in you world humm.. in my past ive used. Wireless, 900mz Wireless 2.4 Cable.. new location new runs new fucking everything.. promised 3 meg you can see 3 gig from 12 am to about 3pm then it shits the bed and you maybe see 1meg hi latency if lucky. DSL im paying for 10 meg and i get 15 meg all the time all day.. I have fiber at work and i see 40 meg all the time.. Ill stick to cable sucks ass! |
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DSL is an inherently buggier and less error-tolerant setup. It's also inherently slower than cable in most applications. That doesn't mean it's going to suck. It might be fine for 99% of your use. What I would say though is that you should make sure that you have good high speed access before you let the installer off the hook. If you're too far from the CO or at the end of some really nasty voice lines, the speed could be worse than dialup and it won't magically get better. Once it's in and installed and running well though, you likely won't even notice too much difference. I have to disagree with your first two sentences as I have seen that as the case with both DSL and Cable. It depends on your service provider, their policies, the condition of your lines, the applications you are running, the power of your computer.... too many variables to attribute problems to DSL alone.. so I don't buy your premise. You can find people on both sides of the spectrum claiming that DSL sucks or Cable sucks, when it may in fact have nothing to do with either or maybe both had issues. We'll have to disagree then. The distances given for DSL runs from the CO have been laughably optimistic in a lot of cases though, and I wonder how much of that is down to infrastructure dating back to the Cuban Missile Crisis. I've always thought of DSL as the telcos buying time for their fiber builds by selling duct tape and bubblegum. You need a good piece of phone wire back to the CO. Cable just requires a good piece of coax back to a booster on a pole somewhere. Coax will throw data farther than phone line without attenuation, and in practice around here it's critical distance is shorter. The CATV folks have been pulling fiber for years to fill out their bandwidth. Verizon only got in on it comparatively recently, but I suspect they'll do real well once they build the networks out some more. |