What are the pros and cons of cable and DSL (respectively)? Which is ultimately better?

Question

What are the pros and cons of cable and DSL (respectively)? Which is ultimately better?

Answer 1

Cable is faster.

Cable is a bit more reliable especially in the suburbs.

DSL signals degenerate quickly, and are subject to some goofiness from things like faxes and phones no matter how well you try to filter it. Cable is in my opinion a better option, BUT as others will no doubt say, cable system do suffer from bogging if the whole neighborhood decides to go to AOL all at once.

Answer 2

I've had both.  With the cable, I found that evenings and weekends my speed would drop dramatically.  With cable, the more subscribers that are online at the same time, coupled with the fact that our cable company here is somewhat small (under 100,000) population, that DSL turned out to by a more dependable albeit, slower connection.  But then, I am also running a wireless network in my home, which means that no matter what DSL or the cable broadband speed is, I'm limited by my routers speed.  So, in the final analysis, the DSL was the better value.

Answer 3

Sorry, there is no "ultimately better."  The answer depends on your local situation.

In a competitive market, DSL and cable will be comparably priced.  Typically cable will get you higher download speed for your money.  If you're mostly downloading large files or watching video, that download speed will help.  The upload speed on cable is usually much slower than the download speed, where on DSL the two speeds will be the same or pretty close.  If you're uploading lots of stuff (say, videos to YouTube), upload speed is good.

You do need to worry about how useful your bandwidth it.  Every network provider oversells bandwidth.  You're promised, say, 2 megabit per second service.  So are the other 10 people they handle in your neighborhood.  But the neighborhood only gets 5 megabit per second service.  If all 10 people used it at the same time, you'd only get 0.5 megabit service in practice.  How badly a provider oversells varies widely.    The answer is to ask around for quality.  http://www.dslreports.com/stest is a good place to test your actual bandwidth.

For typical home use, either one is fast enough, so don't sweat it.  Instead reliability and quality of customer support matters.  This is hard to judge.  Quality will vary from company to company, and even from neighborhood to neighborhood.  Ask people who have the service how it's been for them.

My personal experience has been that the DSL provides, being the phone company, are more professional, having better uptime and more helpful customer support when things go wrong.  My local cable company, on the other hand, offered me lots more download speed for my money (but less upload speed), but also had lots of down time and crappy technical support that couldn't answer simple technical questions.

Sorry I haven't got any easy answers.  If you really care a lot, sadly the only real option is to try them out yourself.  The good news is that you can usually take advantage of introductory deals as you try them out, getting yourself some cheap internet for a few months on each one before settling on one.

Answer 4

Cable Broadband is better by far, over DSL for speed and reliability...