Demalii said:
Capricorn, that article you read about favoring dsl, you still have that? I haven't spoken with anyone who would rather have dsl over cable.. and since we used to run our own rvs and as servers I used to talk to a bunch of people.. when i was making the switch from dsl to cable.. everyone was badmouthing dsl.. just curious to see the article..
I think people's perceptions are different based on their potential providers. You obviously don't live where I live (northern Virginia). We have Adelphia cable and up until about a year or two ago, they had uni-directional cable with cable link down and telephone modem back. Now, they have bi-directional cable. They limit uploads to 128 Kbps. I know people who's cable network connection will just fail for a week at a time. Aldephia doesn't seem to feel any pressing need to fix it, either. They charge $59/month for it, too. But it is darn fast when it's up .. for downloading. Their ping times to servers still suck. About 5-10 x worse than Verizon DSL.
On the flip side, my father-in-law has Roadrunner cable in Ohio, and his cable is almost never down (a several years as a customer) and their ping times are decent. (Where he's at in Ohio, I don't think he's geographically close to any servers I care about, so latency is going to be worse
) I know people who have had a nightmare getting Verizon Online DSL installed. For me, I had a working DSL connection 5 days after I submitted the order (which includes a weekend). I've had it for a few months now, and it was down once -- the day my old DSL provider disconnected it when they were supposed to stop their service. Still, Comcast services counties next to mine, and a couple people I know that have it really like it. I'd consider them if it was avaliable here.
Anyway, some links:
http://jamesthornton.com/writing/cable-vs-dsl-latency.html - informal comparison with DSL having lower latency for this particular person.
http://www.shortfamilyonline.com/tech/networking/cable-versus-dsl.php - generally prefers Cable over DSL, but mentions Cable latency could be worse.
http://www.dslreports.com/faq/129 - Some FAQ on DSL Reports.
Just try a Google search like
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=mozclient&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&q=network+latency+cable+versus+dsl and see what you think.
I didn't think any of these were conclusive either way. Basically, I think if the ISP - cable or DSL - wants to make latency an issue and address it and reduce it, they can. Some just don't care.