Finally, some more informed discussion!!
Somewhat off topic I suppose, but "in the ballpark", I have been considering whether to sign up for cable or ADSL, both of which are available and in hot competition, so the price is good. But for the freeze-up in mid-December, the week I was to decide, I would have it now. Unfortunately, the cable guy says they must bury, and for me that means 400 ft of tundra, so I am now off 'till spring ...
The advantage of cable is the big 2-way bandwidth, with even larger to come. The advantage of ADSL today is slightly higher b-width now, but soon to fall behind, and more importantly, a fully dedicated line right to the telco switch ...
I was surprised (but should have known, I suppose) that for cable, you are only exclusive to a local neighborhood node, from which you are multiplexed with all the other neighborhood signals back to the cableco switch ... I am told that if they get a lot of subscribers to one node, that the performance can deteriorate markedly (until they split off another node, I suppose) ...
I did ask about the reverse direction b-width, and whether one could operate a server (I had in mind small-site web serving and a remotely viewable home security cam ), and was told that the bandwidth was the same in both directions (just don't operate a high-traffic porn site, they said) ... but I did not use the magic word "asynchronous" and may therefore have been mis-led (i know that's not the right spelling, but it looks so awkward as misled or missled ... that's what Saddam is!)
Any thoughts on cable vs. ADSL? |
