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Technology Stocks : HIGH SPEED ACCESS {HSAC} -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: pass pass who wrote (151)	6/10/1999 2:08:00 AM
From: Goldbug Guru	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 963

The cable modem vs. DSL performance race Though many areas of the United States are still stuck with the paltry transfer rates of ISDN lines, affordable broadband Internet connections via cable modems and some flavors of Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) technology have begun to make their presence felt. In fact, in some areas of the country, including the insulated world of Silicon Valley, where I (and InfoWorld) reside, many communities are starting to get access to both. As a result, some lucky small business and home users actually have a choice between cable and DSL. Inevitably, this has led to discussions about which one is better and which is faster. From an end-user perspective, both services provide a fast, always-on connection that differs only in their physical connections (although even those are remarkably similar). Technologically, however, there are some important differences in how the two types of connections handle the data traffic. Cable modems use a shared access system, like an office network, where all the traffic in a particular area (or neighborhood) travels across a common connection. DSL modems, on the other hand, provide a dedicated connection to the phone company's central office, but then share a single pipe from that central point to the Internet itself. But until recently, there hasn't really been any hard evidence that could support these conclusions. Last week, however, Keynote Systems, a company that tracks overall Internet and Web site performance through its Keynote Business 40 and other services, released an intriguing set of performance test results that compares the performance of cable modem lines and DSL Lines. The results of Keynote's month-long test show that -- at least for the specific TCI/@Home cable modem connection vs. Pacific Bell DSL modem connection it tested -- in the prime-time evening hours of home-based Internet usage, a 384Kbps-guaranteed DSL line (which costs $49 a month, including the ISP charges) was approximately 11 percent faster than a cable modem connection (which costs $39 a month, including the ISP charges). More important, the reason for the difference was because of the bandwidth problems associated with a shared cable modem connection. During the day, cable modems were actually 15 percent faster than DSL lines, but in the evening, the cable modem rates slipped by 8 percent as more users got onto the network. Interestingly, DSL lines improved by 17 percent during that same time period, because the phone line networks over which DSL-based data is carried have less traffic in the evenings.