Cable v. DSL

Posts: 21 · Posted: Tue Oct 14, 2003 2:20 pm Post subject: Cable v. DSL

Having now experienced both cable and DSL, I am curious as to others' experience.

DSL was, in my case, relatively flawless at my last address, which was a relatively stable condo highrise. With cable, and in fairness perhaps because I'm in a rental highrise now with its many connects and disconnects as people move in an out, lots of dropped calls and temporary outages.

I'm switching back to DSL, hoping for a return to that lost and missed reliability of yestermonth Confused

My cable company, upon hearing that I'm dropping their Internet service, suddenly can see "signal issues that could affect [my] service." Interesting, now that I'm voting with my feet, they're all ears Twisted Evil

It might be useful and informative, then, to hear about the experiences, good or bad, of cable v. DSL when using Vonage.

Guest

I guess I have been lucky. My RR cable service is very reliable and fast. I always get better than 2mbps ( ~3 max ) down and over 200kbps ( 320 max ) up. I live not that far off the main drag in a nice quiet neighborhood.

Cheers

Posts: 7 · New Forum Member Joined: Sep 26, 2003 Posts: 7

I live in a Rural area. I should feel blessed that I have at least one broadband provider in my area. I pay a hefty fee for broadband ($90.00) per month. My business class DSL costs $70.00 per month.. Plus an additional $20.00 per month for a block of 8 Static IP addresses. Under the business contract I am only suppose to get 512 Down/256 Up.. But in most cases I get 950 down and 420 up. When I got hooked up with DSL, the tech guy told me I am the only person in my telephone exchange to have a Business Class DSL.. So I get full use of the circuit.

I used to have cable modem service before I moved. One thing I found with DSL.. I am taxed 8% federal, 3% state, plus 1% county.. One thing you might consider with DSL is the cost for taxes because it is part of the phone bill.. I think the taxes and the other goofy fees add on about $10.00 more to my phone bill just for the DSL service.. I don't recall seeing charges like that on my cable bill when I had cable modem service.

My DSL so far is VERY reliable. I had a few outages the past 15 months..
I was offline a few hours on a couple of occasions.

I had problems with the Cable Modem Service. I had a cable modems blow out about every month with thunderstorms. I think the junky apartment I rented didn't have very good grounding.. I had a surge protector with a UPS in line, the surges were coming in from the cable wire. I figured it was the Cable Companies job to provide me with protection.. Anyway, the cable company told me I had to BUY my own modem... I told them the blown modems are not my problem. I told them unless you do something now to fix this line.. When you upgrade the apartment to digital, you are going to replace a dozen boxes every month. I think it took about 50 blown converter boxes for the cable company to realize they needed to redo all the wiring to my old apartment.. Lol

Posts: 12 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Jun 07, 2003 Posts: 12

I've had both sDSL and OptOnline. I've got to say that on the whole the cable modem is MUCH faster and much more reliable.

Posts: 83 · Posted: Fri Oct 17, 2003 3:40 pm Post subject:

Cable for me.

I was a very early adopter of DSL back in the PhoenixDSL days. PhoenixDSL went out of business, then Telocity bought the service then they went out of business, then Rhythms bougth their service then they went out of business. Who's left?

So I got @Home Cable - and they went out of business. My local cable company eventually offered 1.5M/128k and - knock on wood - they're still in business 2 years later.

I liked DSL for the low latency and sync speeds - but I had to have local phone service whether I liked it or not. It sucked and was very expensive.

With cable - I've cut the land line ties via Vonage, however I still have to have Basic Cable TV in order to have my cable modem.

Satellite is too slow, extremely high latency, no VPN and way too expensive.

I'm to far out in the sticks to get Microwave...

You just can't win.

I vote for Cable.

Posts: 21 · Posted: Sat Oct 18, 2003 7:57 pm Post subject:

Well, so far so good with DSL being better than cable (in Chicago). But I'll admit I still haven't had that long-winded conversation with Mom (you know how that is). The DSL came right up, worked immediately. I can't say that was the case with cable.

Anyone wanna buy a cable modem cheap?

Anyway, I'll post again after I get that call from Mom Smile

Posts: 106 · Posted: Sun Oct 19, 2003 9:17 am Post subject:

what was wrong with this one

vonage-forum.com/ftopic128.html+dsl+poll" target="_blank">http://www.vonage-forum.com/ftopic128.html+dsl+poll

Posts: 21 · Posted: Tue Oct 21, 2003 3:38 pm Post subject:

To answer whatsupdoc's question, there's nothing wrong with the cable modem (a brand new one in fact)-- just the cable service itself had problems. It acted the same way with the cable company provided modem, and so I bought my own, more recent technology modem hoping that would help.

The "cable" light would go out, then the conversation at both ends would go off for several seconds and then come back on again. During this time, the "cable" light would flash and then the conversation would be restored in 10 to 30 seconds. In the case of my Mom, it didn't matter because when it came back on, she'd still be chatting happily away Smile

In most other cases, it usually resulted in the other person hanging up on me.

Now that I've had that long-winded conversation with Mom over the new DSL service, and some other long duration calls since with nary a problem, I just had my cable Internet service disconnected.

A positive aspect of all of this is that I'll be using the bare-bones RBOC phone line for fax, which saves me the bucks I might have coughed up by getting a Vonage fax line. So I ought to break just about even, all things considered.

I'll probably put the cable modem up for sale on eBay; looks like people are getting about $20 for them there Rolling Eyes

Posts: 6 · Posted: Thu Oct 30, 2003 8:48 pm Post subject:

I have had both Cable and DSL. When I lived in New Hampshire, I had RoadRunner/MediaOne/ATT Broadband (Changed names during my service) and for the most part is was reliable. The biggest thing is that it was VERY FAST.

Once I moved to my current location, I initially only had the option of PPPoE DSL, however Cable is available now but it is capped. The more you pay, the faster service you get. My DSL service is VERY RELIABLE and fast but not as fast as my NH Cable Internet. I have had less down time with my DSL and the speed differential is minor.

If I had to compare the two, I would say they both have their pros and cons depending on what is more important to you. If the same Cable services were available that I had in NH with my current PPPoE DSL, I would go with Cable ONLY because I had a static IP versus a dynamic IP now. With both equal, I would choose DSL. Like I said, it just depends on your needs ... Lol

Posted: Tue Nov 18, 2003 8:49 am Post subject: Traceroute timing out

Well, first off, I think the DSL Cable argument depends entirely on local service. I know people who get pathetic cable service that can get amazing DSL service, and vice versa.

On a slightly off topic subject, I was looking at the link that whutsupdoc provided (vonage-forum.com/ftopic128.html+dsl+poll" rel="nofollow" target="_blank" class="postlink">http://www.vonage-forum.com/ftopic128.html+dsl+poll) and saw that you can use traceroute to vonage to test your connection. However, when I use traceroute or ping to get to either vonage.com or to the specific IP mentioned on the post, which was preproxy1.vonage.net (12.144.47.27), I get a timeout after about 15 hops.

Does this mean Vontage won't work for me? Or that I will have crappy service? Or does it just mean that I know almost nothing about networking and am just being a complete idiot?

Thanks for any advice!