On Thursday, September 11, 2003, at 09:40 AM, Tyson Schmick explained: > Also be aware that with cable the more people in your neighborhood > that are > online using the cable, the slower it will be. Cable connections are > shared > for an area, they go from house to house to house then to server, > whereas > DSL or dial-up have a straight connection from the house to the phone > company. Thus, on cable at peak hours if enough people are on, the > speed > could be noticeably slower.
This claim has always struck me as being more FUD from BellSouth marketing than anything rooted in fact. Here's my reasoning. Both have the same high-speed connection to the Internet back at their main offices, so any difference has to be in the local network. First the phone company... The phone companies use high-speed fiber connections to their local switching stations and the connections to the DSL customers are then done through slow copper telephone wires. The switching stations may serve many neighborhoods and the slow copper runs may be miles long. All the connections are eventually shared into the fiber at the switching station. BellSouth DSL speeds cap out at 1.5 Mb/s even for their more expensive business plans. Now cable... The cable companies lay high-speed fiber into the local neighborhoods and only the last few hundred feet are done with high-bandwidth copper coaxial cable. I don't know how much speed Insight officially promises, but I've rarely seen the download speed fall as low as 1.5 Mb/s. It's usually at least 2.5 Mb/s. You're sharing the bandwidth to the fiber in both cases. The cable company has the advantage that its fiber runs almost to the doorstep instead of to a switching station miles away and when it does make the jump to copper, it's a jump to coaxial cable instead of plain old straight conductor. I have a next-door neighbor who had BellSouth DSL for a few months. On a good day he was getting 1.1 Mb/s. When he saw the difference in speed between his DSL and my cable, he switched over to a cable connection. I'm downloading a big file from my office right now at 330 kB/s which is at least 330x8=2.64 Mb/s. | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be September 23. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>. | This list's page is <http://erdos.math.louisville.edu/macgroup>.
