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DSL vs Cable

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Any thoughts or recommendations on either of these?  Speed, value, pros and cons of each....

Thanks!

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I’m no expert but as sniper noted above but I would say it depends on two things, the ISP’s reliably itself and your bandwidth needs. DSL is generally slower so if you’re going to do the cord cutter thing and stream TV on several devices bandwidth could be an issue with DSL with a smaller pipe. if you just need the service for email and web surfing the then DSL is probably OK. 

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Here's my contribution.

DSL rides on a POTS line (Plain Old Telephone Service), and the available speed depends on (and is limited by) the distance between the customer site and the nearest POP. (Point-of Presence) The greater the distance, the slower the speed. Available speeds these days range from about 1MB to 30MB. So if you have a POTS line you'll have to check with your carrier for the available speed to your location. Notice that on a DSL connection it's a direct point-to-point, and your traffic is the only traffic.

Internet over cable doesn't care what the distance is, and you pay for as much bandwidth as you want up to the limit your carrier offers you. However you are sharing all the wire between your house and the CATV headend. So speed is not usually guaranteed at all times.

Proceed accordingly.

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23 minutes ago, 45Doll said:

Here's my contribution.

DSL rides on a POTS line (Plain Old Telephone Service), and the available speed depends on (and is limited by) the distance between the customer site and the nearest POP. (Point-of Presence) The greater the distance, the slower the speed. Available speeds these days range from about 1MB to 30MB. So if you have a POTS line you'll have to check with your carrier for the available speed to your location. Notice that on a DSL connection it's a direct point-to-point, and your traffic is the only traffic.

Internet over cable doesn't care what the distance is, and you pay for as much bandwidth as you want up to the limit your carrier offers you. However you are sharing all the wire between your house and the CATV headend. So speed is not usually guaranteed at all times.

Proceed accordingly.

The only thing I'll add to this is that they now have DSL modems that have multiple channels so they can double, triple, quadruple whatever your range limited speed is.   I was capped at 15mbits due to distance until they added a duplexing DSL modem.  It supports up to 4 channels, but I'm only paying for 2 and I get 30mbits now.   If I were closer, it'd be up to 60mbits for 2 channels or 120mbits for 4 channels.

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1 hour ago, 45Doll said:

Internet over cable doesn't care what the distance is, and you pay for as much bandwidth as you want up to the limit your carrier offers you

Cable companies have a fiber backbones so in that respect you are correct and it doesn’t matter. What does matter is the length of the Coax drop from the tap to the home.  Say if you have an aerial Coax install over 150 feet from the tap and the installer used the standard RG-6 you could have problems as I did. I measured our drop and was just under 200 feet from the tap on the pole and we never had dependably service with cable.

After I found that RG6 had that distance limitation with all our ongoing service issues I’d asked the Cable Co to replace the drop with RG-11 (which is common practice for the longer runs)  but they declined.  We were fortunate because Verizon also serves our area so we dumped cable and restarted our service with VZ.

Just a side note on RG11 drops, it would only be ran from the tap to the grounding blocking. From the ground block and inside the home it  would the standard RG6

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19 hours ago, FXDX said:

Cable companies have a fiber backbones so in that respect you are correct and it doesn’t matter. What does matter is the length of the Coax drop from the tap to the home.  Say if you have an aerial Coax install over 150 feet from the tap and the installer used the standard RG-6 you could have problems as I did. I measured our drop and was just under 200 feet from the tap on the pole and we never had dependably service with cable.

After I found that RG6 had that distance limitation with all our ongoing service issues I’d asked the Cable Co to replace the drop with RG-11 (which is common practice for the longer runs)  but they declined.  We were fortunate because Verizon also serves our area so we dumped cable and restarted our service with VZ.

Just a side note on RG11 drops, it would only be ran from the tap to the grounding blocking. From the ground block and inside the home it  would the standard RG6

Did not realize this, I do have RG11 to the grounding block (which Comcast left floating, I had to run it to ground myself). But I probably have at least 100' RG6 inside...

Unfortunately, my options are limited to Comcast, Verizon dsl, or satellite.

Can anyone explain the 5mbps limit on upload speed for cable?  I had to upload a W10 iso the other day and it it took hours.

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2 hours ago, leahcim said:

Did not realize this, I do have RG11 to the grounding block (which Comcast left floating, I had to run it to ground myself). But I probably have at least 100' RG6 inside...

Unfortunately, my options are limited to Comcast, Verizon dsl, or satellite.

Can anyone explain the 5mbps limit on upload speed for cable?  I had to upload a W10 iso the other day and it it took hours.

Just keep in mind the heavier RG-11 cable is for the extended drop lengths from the tap or pole (if aerial install)  to the home. If you under 150 ft RG-6 is fine. Again I’m not expert but splitters and splices also play a role in performance. Sometime you could get a general idea how things are going by viewing your modem stats to see if they are in within spec.     

Are you sure you don’t mean download the W10 ISO?  I'm not sure why you would want to upload it?  As far as u/l speeds caps that’s cable and dsl in a nutshell. The only way around slow uploads is fiber connection where you get a symmetrical connections like 200/200, 500/500 or even symmetrical gig speed as noted above. Most people don’t upload as much as they download download as much as they upload so the slower upload speeds on cable suck but it isn’t a deal breaker if the service works correctly.  

Edited by FXDX
edit typo

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13 minutes ago, FXDX said:

Most people don’t download as much as they upload

I think you have that backwards.   Most people download far more than upload. (For example my family uploads 5% of our downloads). 
That said, there are reasons to upload. An ISO will easily overrun any bandwidth caps.   I had to push up a custom RHEL/Redhawk ISO and agree that it can take forever. 

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15 minutes ago, voyager9 said:

I think you have that backwards.   Most people download far more than upload. (For example my family uploads 5% of our downloads). 
That said, there are reasons to upload. An ISO will easily overrun any bandwidth caps.   I had to push up a custom RHEL/Redhawk ISO and agree that it can take forever. 

correct, I did get that backwards and will fix it thanks. sure, there are many reasons to u/l but not seeing a reason to u/l a MS Win10 ISO as one of them. if it is for recovery anyone could d/l it and all you need is your own valid key

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2 hours ago, FXDX said:

Just keep in mind the heavier RG-11 cable is for the extended drop lengths from the tap or pole (if aerial install)  to the home. If you under 150 ft RG-6 is fine. Again I’m not expert but splitters and splices also play a role in performance. Sometime you could get a general idea how things are going by viewing your modem stats to see if they are in within spec.     

Are you sure you don’t mean download the W10 ISO?  I'm not sure why you would want to upload it?  As far as u/l speeds caps that’s cable and dsl in a nutshell. The only way around slow uploads is fiber connection where you get a symmetrical connections like 200/200, 500/500 or even symmetrical gig speed as noted above. Most people don’t upload as much as they download download as much as they upload so the slower upload speeds on cable suck but it isn’t a deal breaker if the service works correctly.  

From the pole to the grounding block at my house is about 125', they just ran RG11 without any back talk.

I was uploading the iso to send to someone else, it is a special configuration.

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2 hours ago, leahcim said:

From the pole to the grounding block at my house is about 125', they just ran RG11 without any back talk.

I was uploading the iso to send to someone else, it is a special configuration.

Optimum declined to replace ours and the issues continued so went back to Verizon as cord cutters. When I called to cancel the service they offered to replace the coax then by that time too little too late.   I removed their drop from my home back to the pole so they are done.

That's makes sense on the ISO

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Well, now that AT&T has taken over Direct TV, those radicals have some really poor customer service. 

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