Yep, cable is the biz, 4 meg down, 2 meg up. Kicks the little brown pellets out of DSL every time. Cable will even go to 30 meg down if your the right person.
There's 4 things that throttle dsl generally,some of these affect other technologies as well.
1. noise on the local loop. This has increased with the go large because of the greater download speeds. ADSL2+ may or may not fix this. noise is the reason Telecom uses interleaving with inserts a minimum of 40msec latency ( IIRC) on the local loop. (another reason to go with cable)
2. ATM Backhaul to exchange. The DSLAMs in the roadside cabinets can be fed by as little as 2meg links. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to realise that if there are 4 subscribers (or more) sharing that 2 meg link then sometimes you'll struggle to get 2 meg. This doesn't affect cable so much because the cable terminators (CMTS) run Ethernet (100 meg) backhaul (and they're in the exchanges)
3. subscription rates on the ATM backhaul. Telecom allocate a certain bw per subscriber, this is a fraction of the rate that you purchase. I'm unsure of the minimum, but it could mean than 100's of suscribers are contesting for BW through circuits only able to supply 2 of them at full speed. (cable subsription rates very rarely cause congestion, again because the backhaul is 100m per CMTS.
4. infrastructure capacity. ATM is the main backhaul to the core of the network and to other ISP's. These links are called legacy and the equipment is costly to upgrade if it's possible in the first place. The links on ATM networks tend to be heavily over used. Most smaller ISP's don't tend to rely on ATM, however their interconnects to the 2 main players (Telecom/Telstraclear) are not free, so they tend to be managed frugally. Other areas of infrastructure such as overutilised routers may also cause problems.
One last thing, who nows what the telcos are doing to throttle your traffic after all the above has shat all over your throughput.
Some things are worth dying for, living is one of them.
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