> If you can, please elaborate on bandwidth limitations with cable. My
>ÿlimited understanding was that the main draw of cable was the lack
>ÿof bandwidth problems. In other words, that there was plenty of
> bandwidth for the forseeable future.
Their is a very good bandwidth with cable modem, i have personnally experienced transfers at about 160 kb/s when I was at my friend's place, tranferring my thesis files from an university computer which is on a multi megabits link. (like a t3 or multiple t3, don't know exactly).
The limitation is that you share your bandwidth with other people around you. Imagine your cable company decide to serves 50 potential customers with one feed. At first, there are 3 out the 50 who use the cable modem, so you have plenty of bandwidth. But after a few months, there are 20 people using the same feed. If 3 of your neighbors are sucking the bandwidth with XXX pictures, you will see a degraded performance, both in terms of average transfer rate but also in lag time. Their is a known bottleneck with cable modem and if too many people use it heavily at the same time, the general performance goes down. In fact, it is the very same problem as with the internet backbone in general, but closer to your computer. If your adsl isp is direct on the backbone, there is at least one "weak node" removed, compared to cable modem.
This being said, I don't want you to think cable modem is a bad technology, it's not. It's better than dialup and isdn hands down in a price/performance ratio
from 1(worst) to 10(best), i would rank links as follow (on a performance basis alone)
10 dedicated T1
8 adsl
6 cable modem
5 isdn
3 56k modem dialup
1 1200 bauds ppp connection (my first internet connection several years ago, ah good old days... ;-) )
Ludo |
