DSL vs Cable

Right now I have Charter cable 3.0mbps and am thinking of switching. It is very unreliable.

Where I live, the only alternative is Bellsouth DSL 1.5mpbs.

Does anyone have any experience with DSL? Would that be fast enough to play online games?

Jeff

I'm running both here. In the past I had a lot of problems with Charter and their DHCP automatic lease renegotiation. Seems to be working fine now. I also have verizon DSL. Performance on it varies greatly, as in when school is out and the kiddies get home and start in gaming, my network stuff goes to $hit. That is why I also have Charter now, cause I'm checking it out again as the DSL just isn't cutting it. At least the pipe is larger on Charter. I also have to say that the help desk stuff with Verizon really sucks compared to charter.

Strange that Verizon's DSL would slow down when things are busy. DSL is supposedly immune from that since every one gets their own bandwidth unlike cable where it is shared. We have DSL at work and the ping is on par with cable and the speeds are very consistent day or night. I think it has been down once in the past 6 months and that was for about 3 hours.

Well it could be the load on one of the feed pipes too for that matter. Just happens about everyday about the time school gets out. :)

Anyway, to continue the saga though. There are latency issues with Charter that there aren't with verizon dsl. And I'll keep the verizon dsl. Not so with the charter. And another little issue is spam, verizon does a much much better job on restricting spam.

Not too much about the subject, but one thing I noticed between the two main cable ISP providers here in Portugal is the "malware" filtering capability.
I formatted a friend of mine's pc once, and after installing windows I plugged in the cable modem so windows would detect it and install the drivers and all that. But I hadn't put a firewall yet. The moment I plugged the modem and windows installed the drivers, the modem went crazy on transfering data up and down and not even one minute later I was already infected with spyware! :shock:
Conclusion... to not start on the wrong foot I formatted it again, and installed all firewall/antivirus/anti-spyware and so forth and only after all that I plugged in the modem.

And this is completely the opposit of my ISP in which I can plug in my modem with the computer completely unprotected and it won't happen anything. I can even browse around and as long as I don't go to bad pages nothing happens. In fact, I had never gained the habit of installing firewall first and plug net afterwards if I hadn't seen that happening.

Anyone got any idea on how do the ISP's make that kind of filtering? And if so, why don't all ISP's do it?

Here's my 2 cents worth.

Personally, I do NOT want the ISP to do any filtering for me thank you, I'll take care of that myself. It's a very easy task either with software, hardware or if your paraniod like I am, with both.

I run a Linksys NAT/router which works as a natural firewall to the outside world and allows me to network all of my computers thru one single connection to the internet. In addition, I run Zonealarm Suite which performs cookie control, spam control, spyware and antivirus protection and an additional firewall.

I am not bothered by pop ads,viruses or spyware and its currently impossible to hack thru the NAT from the internet. To a large degree, I strongly advocate the user taking ownership of protecting their own machines rather than depending on Big Brother to do it for us.

Hello agree with you rrcrain,

Every person must protect himself and not wait for the provider to do that, even because depending on where you are going (net) and your surf methods you should have more or less protection.

I also depend on "NAT Security" for my house.

Rg

Same here rrcrain,

NAT and zonealarm pro + AVG on every machine.

Ototero, your avatar lost her wiggle!

I'll be moving within the month and with the move, I'll be loosing cable internet access. Unfortunately, I'll be relegated only to dial up as that's all there is in the country.

Also, my first name is Richard.

NAT router and zonealarm pro here

I dont know if Cox communications does any filtering on its networks, but i do know that they seem to be running port scans on machines in their networks. Had a port scan coming in from a computer i found out was a cox server. When i called Cox about it the tech guy told me that they were searching for open ports on machines that could be zombies.

Not to hijack the thread but I wanted to share something that may help rrcrain. I live out in the country as well and for the longest time I was stuck with ISDN 128K/128K which cost around $140 a month. It sucked but at least I could play games and have low ping. Just by luck and chance I happened to mention my situation to a guy at a local computer store and he suggested an ISP that may help me. Turns out that they offer wireless internet to anyone who has a line of sight view of their towers. I have had that for about 2 years now and it is really great. Isn't the fastest at 768k/128k for $45 a month. My ping in games has been down as low as 30 ms but is usually around 50ms. For comparison my DSL at work is usually around 70 ms and local cable in town is about 50ms.

Keith

There is a company experimenting with the service, no where near where I'm moving to. It's an odd spot with an Edelstein address, the kids go to Princeville, and nearest town is Chillicothe and its 10 miles outside of Peoria.

dont know why my earlier post didnt appear :S but it read ...

No Zone Alarm installed but here i have had no problems in either IE or firefox.

^^ forget that.

looking in wrong forum. lol