With wireless DSL and DSL hitting rual areas now I am wondering if it is worth a second look. For many it is simpley Phone company or cable company, which do you find to be the best?

I've used wireless DSL in Japan, and cable back in the states. Going based on the technology only, not dealing with service, I definitely prefer cable. It's a heck of a lot faster I've found, and more importantly, you're not sitting on an internal network. When we got DSL here (Japan, cable wasn't offered on base) I was really excited cause I thought I'd finally get to run my site off my computer. But you're on an internal network, and so you can't route requests to your machine obviously. I can run whatever I want off my cable connection. I know some people run servers off DSL, so I don't know if it's different in the states. In Japan, there's one ground line phone company, NTT, which owns everything. So there are no options on DSL, you just get what they give you, and they assign you a 10.0.x.x address on their network.

I'd have to say cable just 'cause my DSL sucks. I usually never have speeds above 30kbps. Perg, I thought it was cable that runs on an internal network?

i have cable and am happy with it. i get questions from lots of ppl w/ dsl lines though cuz it's not working, or they're getting disconnected, or it sucks. lol. cable it up to the max!//

was on cable in nebraska and in colorado. now i'm on dsl in iowa. as far as i can tell, the dsl is just as fast. haven't had any problems yet with it.

i prefer cable.

I use cable. Have been since I went online a little over two years ago, and it rocks. I average about 2.5Mbps no matter the speed test. In comparison to the people I know around here with DSL I kill em everytime. Supposedly with cable you share bandwidth with your neighbours. Well I live in the downtown core of a city of just over a mil and I still get the speeds I mentioned. Cable pwns you all .

Infinite

I'm on DSL now, and let me tell you, I so prefer cable over this... the only upside to the DSL is that the modem is a little smaller :/...

I've used both DSL and Cable in the same apartment.

In the next apartment over I got speeds like this on DSL:

Max DL: 150KB/s of 192KB/s bandwidth
Max UP: 13KB/s of 16KB/s bandwidth

Then I moved to this apartment and got shitty downloads which don't even need to be mentioned. Now I use cable and this is my speeds:

Max DL: 192+KB/s of 192KB/s bandwidth
Max UP: 14KB/s of 16KB/s bandwidth

since then comcast upgraded the upload
Max UP: 31KB/s of 32KB/s bandwidth

This is just my ISP though. Comcast seems to be pretty good about keeping their users from going over their cap limit. Many other cable providers are more lax and you can see skyrocketing speeds. DSL is practically as fast, but not as efficient of your bandwidth.

The comment on internal networks... Only foreign countries get this problem. On DSL or Cable you can host services in the US, unless some oddball cheapass service here feels like doing otherwise.

Cable all the way.

I've gotten download speeds of up to 425KB/s off of kazaa on my cable connection.

Ha ha ha .. my Internet connection beats all of yours, with my *beep... beep, shhhhh* it's such a wonderful system with the "disconnecting" and the "re dialing" I want to through my modem out the window... exspecailly living in the country the service is terrible. (at least when you go through Telus)

Download speeds of 425 kb/s! Insane! On Kazaa, even if the file has a large bandwidth number, I'll often see 3-5 kb/s. I average only about 20 kb/s with my DSL. As you can see, it sucks.

I just moved to Nova Scotia this week and got Aliant's ADSL service, it cops out at around 160k, and that was with a 40 foot wire going from the basement through the house to a phone jack upstairs, I just hooked up a much shorter line directly to my houses phone box so it should go faster now. Back when I had cable I remember seeing speeds as high as 400k, but with where I live DSL is $20 cheaper a month than cable and works fine, unless you like wasting money on bandwidth you dont need just go for the bang for your buck

I know how it feels Reaper...
But there is a comapny that is suppose to deliver me ADSL but the have taken the looong way here. It took em like 9 months to apply for the right to put in an ADSL card in our station. But did they think of applying for electricity? No they didnt and now they're "working" on that " title="" src="graemlins/pissed.gif" /> . If they cant get me ADSL before this fall, I just dont know if i have the strength to live with it!!!

i also prefer cable. dsl is more reliable if you can get it. unfortunately dsl get slower and slower as you get farther away from the isp box. i have a cable connection and it is pretty fast. §in Tax definitely said it right about the technology though. the max possible thouroghput on cable is much higher than dsl. on of my friends uncapped his cable modem breifly just for a test....he scored a whopping 21000K*bit*/s on a test server....of course he had to replace the cap unfortunatly becuz it wouldn't take the isp long to figure it out. the only problem with cable i find is that it is shared resources where with dsl you have a straight line to the isp. i.e.

CABLE
MY CONNECTION->NODE (WHICH CONNECTS TO LOTS OF OTHER PPL)->ISP(WHICH CONNECTS TO LOTS OF OTHER NODES)->INTERNET

DSL
CONNECTION->ISP->INTERNET (much simpler lol)

so thats the way i see it at least. but i definitely prefer cable.

with my cable connection i can get about 350KB/s dl and about 30KB/s upload.

I work for a DSL, ISP so I may be partial. But far as I can tell DSL would be the better one. But there are so many variables. Some area's have old Copper lines and DSL goes down and is shitty in those areas. If I was there I would naturally go with cable. If I was in an area with good lines and reliable DSL service I would go with DSL because of the fact that you have your own set bandwidth. So your speed will always been reltivly the same unless its on the backbone. Where as cable everyone shares the same "Pipe" and your speeds can drop if a number of people get in and start dl'ing music or what not. So I think it al depends on where you live.

Oh and addition to what I just posted, (Sorry I forgot this). Anyway you look at it, Broadband is Broadband and it sure beats the hell outta dial up.

A lot of ppl mentioning cables large fluctuation, but I must say I used cable starting 3 years ago and have used it off and on without many complaints at all. DSL sucked for a while, but even the one broadband service we have here isn't too bad, so it must have come a long way. Nowadays, I would say, if delivery of either isn't the issue, then its not a big deal. Most people going to have speeds capped at same rate regardless of medium.