dsl or cable?

September 24, 2005 1:16 PM

DSL or Cable? Why is dialup so damn fast?

I've had DSL for years. This summer, back east, I had to dialup for email a couple times, and I noticed something: either dialup has gotten blazingly fast, or my DSL sucks. There was little noticable difference between the two, except for downloading.
My question: here at the southern edge of the Mission District in San Francisco, does anybody have comparative notes on which service is faster? I know cable can be neighborhood and local usage-dependant, and I'd love some comments from those who have direct experience.

One more thing. I'm pacbell DSL (now SBC) . I'll also take advice for other DSL service providers.

posted by asavage to computers & internet (11 comments total)

I'm guessing you're confusing latency and bandwidth. The latency (responsiveness) of DSL and dialup are about the same, since it's mostly determined by what's between the ISP and the server you're trying to connect to. Also, webservers spent the same amount of time processing before they start sending data, however you connect to them. Finally, web browsers have an inbuilt pause between receiving data and showing you stuff, to prevent flickering. Again, the pause is the same however you connect.
posted by cillit bang at 1:25 PM on September 24, 2005

Plus to add your dial up certainly hasnt got any faster. The theoretical 56k is as fast as it will ever get as it is a physical limitation of using analogue lines.
Out of interest, what speed is/was your dsl line? The standard may be 512k - 2mb now (in the UK anyway), but my thoughts are that maybe you have one of those cheaper deals at 256 or even 128k or something. Maybe.
posted by qwerty155 at 4:29 PM on September 24, 2005

There was little noticable difference between the two, except for downloading.

Downloading is pretty much the only place you are going to notice a difference in connection speeds. Perhaps the speed difference you noticed was due to a different computer.
posted by sophist at 4:52 PM on September 24, 2005

For a month after I moved I tried dial up about a year ago (free aol) and consistently got downloads over 8-10kbs which is twice what its supposed to be. I think the reasoning was that the availability of broadband has kind of a trickledown effect. The network (isp) has a lot more bandwidth than the old school dialup days. FWIW I was using a real external modem.
posted by psychobum at 5:09 PM on September 24, 2005

DSL or Cable?

This is actually a non-question. There is no single answer as to which type of connection is faster than the other. It depends completely on what package you buy, what's available in your area, and how good your service provider is. It just isn't reducible like this. Sorry.

broadbandreports.com has lots of reviews by location. Look up your zip code.
posted by scarabic at 5:42 PM on September 24, 2005

FWIW, here in New Zealand some people have speculated that the local telco is actively managing the latency of their DSL service to make VOIP less attractive. Just a thought...
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 5:54 PM on September 24, 2005

You should check the DSL modem itself, often it has a web page that will report statistics such as its sync speed.

In this particular part of Newport Beach, CA, DSL syncs at about 20-30 kbits / sec and can't hold the signal for more than a few seconds. Dialup is moderately faster and more reliable. Cable modem is much faster than either.
posted by b1tr0t at 8:17 PM on September 24, 2005

Plus to add your dial up certainly hasnt got any faster. The theoretical 56k is as fast as it will ever get as it is a physical limitation of using analogue lines.

Maybe, maybe not.

One possibility is that your ISP has implemented proxy caching -- nearly all of them have nowadays -- and some type of embedded dial-up acclerator (similar to AOL TopSpeed, goes by many other names). Your ISP may now fully support V.92, which offers a slight boost over V.90 56K modems, and incorporates V.44 compression. Altogether that has the potential to improve your apparent browsing speed by 2x or more.

Unlike standalone "internet accelerator" programs, these actually work, because they're implemented where it counts.

That said, merely browsing will rarely tax your dial-up, because site availability and latency is a much bigger issue. I'm on DSL here and three of my primary sites -- Metafilter, Last.fm, and Wikipedia -- are nearly unusable at times for reasons that have nothing to do with my connection to the internet.
posted by dhartung at 11:19 PM on September 24, 2005

get cable. problem solved.
posted by angry modem at 11:43 PM on September 24, 2005

A note regarding DSL and cable: In the US, cable often has faster download speeds, but DSL often has faster upload speeds. Personally, my Qwest/Oz.net DSL download rate is fast enough, and I appreciate being able to upload files 2-4x faster than my friends on Comcast cable.

As for latency, I don't know how they compare, but agree that it is an important metric. It used to be that modems added a lot of latency while DSL had minimal latency, but I think modems have improved their implementations, while DSL providers have resorted to higher latency technology in order to improve their yields on questionable lines.

In the US I think the FCC has come down on anyone trying to inhibit VoIP performance by tampering with latency in a negative manner.
posted by Good Brain at 1:38 PM on September 25, 2005

A quick note: I've used DSL and cable all across the country, finding OptOnline to give me the most bandwidth (10/1Mb) until now. Verizon FIOS gives me 15/2Mb (and I really can get 1.4MB/s down and 280kB/s up) with amazing latency. With OOL it took 7 hops to get to the gateway, with FIOS, the next hop from my obsd router *is* the gateway. I can never go back.
posted by gren at 7:40 AM on October 25, 2005