Cable vs DSL

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It wasn't listed as an option, and my non-tech mind was sure if it's considered to be the same. My system is Verizon FIOS...we used to have a regular DSL line which worked fine..except that Verizon was no longer regularly maintaining the copper (?) cables in our area. So, we tried FIOS. It's worked very very well.

We had considered cable, but like you...I worried about the cable company's...abilility to tell the truth. We already have that issue with respect to our cable television service!!

and heh...since starting SL....not sure I even watch much tv anymore!

Yay FIOS!

(but I'd also like some pie, please)

I am not familar with FIOS.. How doe that work. I use Verizon for all of my cell phone service.

"G"

Um...tech dope here...but it uses fiber optic technology..


http://www22.verizon.com/content/consumerfios/faqs/faqs.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verizon_Fios

However, I think you mentioned you are out in the country....I think Verizon is focusing on metro areas right now, but I could be wrong about that.

I have cable and couldn't be happier. I have had it for a few years but before this all I ever had was dial up, which was so slow it prevented me from really getting on the internet and enjoying myself. I started out with 3 mbps, then I upgraded to 5 mbps, now Im up to 10 mbps download with 1 mbps upload. I threatened to cancel my service and they offered me the 10 mbps upgrade for $5 more per month. So Im paying like $60 per month for cable tv and the 10 mbps which is great as far as Im concerned. They called me yesterday and offered to lower my payment by $10 per month if I signed up for their phone service for 29.99 per month, which i was thinking about doing, but i don't like the idea of having such a huge bill with one single company, its harder to juggle around the money when the money is tight! I saw an infomercial the other day with this USB thing that you plug into the computer and you have phone service through your pc for like $40 per year, anybody ever hear of this?

We use cable, and really love it! Thank goodness, though, that Comcast is not our cable provider. The only problem is that now and then no data shows as coming through the modem and neither my husband nor I can connect to the internet. The longest this has lasted at any one time is only an hour, so we can live with it.

I have a good friend who would really like to try SL, but she is way down in a rural area witih nothing around her but Amish farms. There is no cable in her area since to even run the cables, there would need to be a certain number of homes using it, and there just isn't down there. Amish don't have televisions, so the cable company won't run the cables unless my friend pays an exorbitant amount of money. She was also recently told that DSL isn't available to her, yet, either.

Does anyone know if satellite internet works well?

Sunni, my parents live way out in the country too and have that same problem, they can't get cable or dsl because there arent' enough people in the area and no lines in the area to connect to. And they just moved there from the city where they had a great dsl connection so they were used to having fast internet. They got the satellite service through direct tv and it has been a huge disappointment for them and expensive. They don't have much choice though, it is better than dial up but it always goes out on them and the speeds aren't very good at all.

Ugh! It might be my friends only choice, though, if she can't find any DSL available. And she still won't be able to join SL since I don't think it's compatible with satellite internet. So, I guess I won't be inviting her over to my skybox to hang out anytime soon. Well, not until she moves anyway.

We have Cable (Comcast, and yeah they're a pain in the ass but I don't watch much TV anyway so it's only about the internet for me)

Cable internet is great....it's fast and it's ideal for gaming. The only glitch is that in our area it's Comcast and they are terrible with customer service.....we get modem and cable box dead outs....where suddenly either the modem stops blinking and we lose internet for a bit....or it IS blinking...but for some reason there's no connection. Normally these are short lived and I deal.......but the cable tv is terrible. Every other day we lose the feed thru the box....or we can't watch an on demand movie cause we get an 'error' messege....or it just goes out completely.

But.....as far as internet speed and usability... I wouldn't trade it. However...where we will be moving we may only be able to get DSL so I'm really curious if there are any happy DSL users out there. I'll be in FL at my sister's at first and I know she has DSL... and I'm pretty sure where we will be house hunting....we'll only have a DSL option.

I have Cablevision for Internet and HDTV and the service has been excellent. Customer Service has been fine, I've never had an outage in the 4 years I've been at this house. Verizon came by recently, selling FIOS, but I really don't see any benefit to changing.

I didn't even realize satellite wouldn't work with SL. Its not that bad, but it is a joke trying to use their internet to get anything done whenever i have used it. I think theirs is like 1 or 2 mbps but maybe its possible to get a higher speed. There is a serious latency problem with it too, at least in their case. The thing that turned me off about it was that they had to pay like $600 to get it connected.

I have cable and it works fine for me. OTOH, it is either that or dial up or, God forbid, satellite in my area. Phone company just thumbs their nose at us rural folks that might like to have DSL as an option.

Thank goodness to Telephone Co-Ops! Running DSL from them. Usually outages last an hour and it only hickups when it rains, because one of the minor switch boxes is at the end of our driveway... and usually underwater when it rains

Yes, we're out in the boonies. Cable doesn't run out here either, so it's digital satellite for TV. No biggie.

I have cable, and it's fine most of the time. The problem with cable is that the bandwidth is shared, and cable companies are notorious for overselling the service beyond the available bandwidth. There can be noticeable service degradation during peak hours. In my particular case, in the four years I've owned my house, the service has degraded to the point where my cable modem can no longer maintain a reliable connection unless it's down in the basement only one splitter away from where the cable enters the house. I have to use a wireless network to get it up to the loft where my office is. When Fios becomes available in my area I plan to dump Comcast as fast as humanly possible.

I have Road Runner (Time Warner Cable), and it's great. I should qualify that statement by saying I have no love for cable companies. Having worked in the television provider industry in the past, I could tell you stories about some of the things those guys have done to the detriment of the American public that would have you out in the streets with torches and pitchforks looking for blood. I have satellite for TV (those guys are slime too, but it's a more privatized kind of slime, at least), but unfortunately, there's not much choice but to use cable for Internet if you want the best speeds and the most reliable service.

Once I'd learned of the evils of the cable industry, I switched to Verizon DSL (this was years before it became known that the phone companies are even worse than the cable companies, cooperating illegally with the administration to wiretap the whole damned country, and all that). OK, that was the last political comment, I promise. Let's talk user experience.

Verizon DSL was nothing short of disaster in a box. The price was nice, but man was it slow as molasses in winter. I was lucky to break 1000 kbs down/300 up on a good day. Most of the time, it was a tiny fraction of that. Needless to say, SL was not happy with those speeds.

But the real killer with them, was not the sub-standard speed. It was the fact that their entire ISP department was seemingly beyond incompetent. After I once forgot to pay the bill on time, and they'd rightly shut off the modem until I paid, they were then completely unable to figure out how to turn the damned thing back on. Every time I'd call to say why isn't this working, they'd transfer me around to about 10 or 20 different people (no exaggeration), each of whom would lay the blame on one of the other guys. Not a soul over there could figure out which button to press, and no one was willing to admit it.

This went on every single day for about three weeks until I finally swallowed my pride and decided to return to cable (it was Adelphia at the time). I called them up and said "Verizon DSL is not working. I need Internet ASAP. As far as I'm concerned, whoever can get me online first wins. You want in on the race? How soon can you get here?" They showed up the very next morning.

And wow, what a speed difference. Right away, I was getting 6000 kbps down/768 up, reliably. A few months later, they rewired the neighborhood, and then I was getting - get this - 35,000 kbps down! The up speed remained about the same, but the down speed was incredible.

Now, the right thing once I was hooked up with cable would have been to call Verizon and tell them to get lost, right? Well, I didn't do that. I was really curious to see whether or not they'd ever figure out how to turn the thing on. So I left the modem plugged, sitting on my desk, waiting for the day when that little light would stop blinking and turn solid, to indicate that it had been reactivated. It sat there for six months, no change. I still have it. It's sitting in my closet right now. They've never asked for it back, which means they must still think I have an account with them. But they've also never sent me any more bills, which must mean they think I don't have an account. How can it be both? Like I said, beyond incompetent.

This is why I'll never get FIOS. First, I don't believe their speed claims, since their DSL speeds weren't even close to what was advertised. Second, I don't want to deal with Verizon's Internet department ever again in my lifetime. I do have Verizon Wireless for my cell phone, but that's a necessary evil, and at least that department does know what it's doing.

It seems the DSL woes don't end with Verizon, by the way. I just spent the week at my (late) grandmother's house in Chicago. She, for reasons that completely escape me, apparently had been talked into getting Earthlink DSL by some other family member. All I can say about Earthlink is wow, they have the nerve to call that broadband? I didn't run any actual speed tests, so I can't give stats, but I'd say it was marginally faster than dialup at best. It was by far the sowest "high speed" Internet service I've ever seen.

And that's before even getting into all the virus-like infestation-ware they convince little old ladies to install on their machines. Go to open IE, or Control Panel, or My Computer, and you get half a dozen popups asking you to install Earthlink this, and Earthlink that. I spent half the week trying to clean that crap out, deleting/uninstalling everything I could find labeled "Earthlink", and nothing changed. Clearly, whatever is in there is self-repairing. Disgusting.

Anyway, with Road Runner, I now get 14,000 down/2,000 up. It would have been nice if that 35,000 down would have lasted, but I lost that when I moved. It was apparently some kind of fluke because the cable company says it doesn't go that fast. But it did. 14,000 is plenty fast enough, though, and I'm of course enjoying the 2,000 up far more than the 768 I had at the other place.

Bottom line, while the cable companies are bunch of scumbags who deliberately position themselves to be able to severely overcharge for substandard TV quality, their Internet works very well. The phone companies are even bigger scumbags whose Internet sucks, and who have no idea what they're doing. Between the competent scumbag who can make it work, and the incompetent bigger scumbag who can't, I'll take the one that works.

End of rant.

I hear you Chip! I live in Northern Virginia, and our FIOS phone and internet service work very well. I am sure I will jinx them by saying..but we have never had one problem (/makes sign against evil eye) We are looking to switch to FIOS television service too..Comcast drives me absolutely crazy.

Milla, I get the same thing with my Comcast. The TV is never affected, but the modem will drop connection, sometimes with all lights blinking and the Comcast CS saying the modem is connected. I have heard everything from tree limbs rubbing the wires, bad ISP address, to our upsteam is too fast. Sometimes it will hit 5 or 6 times a day.

Of course my other option is DSL at just barely faster than dial up speeds.

Your missing fiber Optical connection......................

OMG...I'm never going to be able to get on here once I move LOL My sister has DSL.....I have no idea how good the speed is since her laptop takes soooooo long to boot up and she rarely uses internet from home. (I have offered to get rid of all the sh** that slows down her laptop but she just isn't enough of a computer geek to even care)

I'm hoping when I get there and hook up my PC that the DSL will at least allow me on long enough to pay my teir and maintain until we find a house. I guess we're going to have to make cable internet a necessary option when we house hunt.... my fiance is way too much of a game geek to settle fro crappy internet service.

I've heard of it but don't think its available where I live, what kind of speeds are you getting with it?

By the way my cable does go out occasionally too, usually due to the fact that I'm in a small town with lots of big ol' trees hanging over the wires.

Um. I can't participate in this poll. I have ADSL2+ (24Mbps) and am delighted with it.

So many variables are involved that it's a bit difficult to recommend one or the other. ADSL is a copper line solution for example, and the signal degrades over distances. So, if you're unfortunate enough to live several miles from the nearest telephone exchange, ADSL is never going to be optimal for you.


Cable is technologically superior if your service provider uses optical fibre, but most broadband services (ADSL _or_ cable) tend to be oversubscribed (certainly in the UK and US), which can result in slow speeds and (if you're really unlucky) port blocking and throttling if your ISP wants to save money on bandwidth.

Do you research. Shop around. Talk to your neighbours besides people online. Don't assume that the technologically superior option will deliver the best performance.

I live in Oregon and have Comcast also.. It works great for me. My nephew used to work for them and installed my service for me. I am not quite sure what it is called, but he put a bigger thingy on the outside of my house. He said it was too small and I would have trouble if he didnt put on the bigger one. Yes, he did it for free because he is my nephew and loves me unlike Trout. I have 4 tv outlets and my internet service. The only time my cable, both tv and internet have gone out is when someone ran into a telephone pole and knocked it down. It's been three years for me now, and I really love it.

Oh I forgot one thing. I have wireless and when I first got it, it searched for itself and was connecting to the free service (unsecure) instead of mine. Couldnt figure out why I kept disconnecting. That was a definite problem until I went it and changed the listings.

/me wishes every one a safe and Happy Easter. All of you kids go find those Easter eggs.

Hi there, well speeds are good. 100mbps up and down here. Speeds are not bad at all its always stable and my fps are high. I have unlimited bandwith.

Thanks for everyones input. FIOS is not available where I live. My problem is I live in country about 5 miles from the nearest town and 50 miles from the nearest large city.

I bit the bullet and decided on switching back to cable.

Thanks again for the input. Hopefully Monday I'll be able to get back on SL.

"CX"

I have cable and it seems to work fine - it seldom goes out and the performance is usually really good. I don't have the option of DSL and I'm not even sure what other options I might have if I didn't like my cable internet service.