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Category: Geek News and Humour
Cable vs DSL

First of all, this post pertains to my knowledge of cable modems and digital subscriber lines in my location, naturally other contributions to the thread from different locations are welcome.

Cable modems are a little cheaper than DSL, and theres also better access for it, but can slow down if there is too much activity in one "neighborhood". (this also prevents alot of cable users to run a type of "web server")

DSL (yay) runs off the same phone line that you use to call people with (copper wires), but doesnt use up your phone line, i think DSL is a little slower, more expensive and harder to get access to depending on location, there are also phone line restrictions like load coils or if the line is spliced.
also there are different types of DSL's????

im not clear on cable and dsl upload/download speeds.

any comments on price/installation etc.?

If you guys provide some links thats cool, but i would really like personal feedback/opinions, what does each of you have? who has tried both?

Well, DSL and Cable typically run neck and neck. In some cities, one is slightly faster than the other, but more or less, it's all the same. In my area, I have Cable at home where I download around 80-90Kbps. At work, 3 blocks away, we have DSL that downloads at 160 Kbps. It depends on the city though. In San Francisco (Daly City), Cable is typically faster than DSL speeds.

As far as DSL goes, the differences depend on you. IDSL is based on ISDN technology. Yuck! ADSL has faster download speeds than upload speeds. SDSL has equal download/upload speeds. If you're running a web server, I'd go with SDSL. Otherwise, ADSL is just fine.

im not clear on cable and dsl upload/download speeds.
Using ADSL
The A in ADSL stands for Asynchron which points at the difference in download and upload speed. I get to 3300 Kbps downloading and 128 kbps uploading. I've tryed to check this the best i can, and when downloading, my connection can maintain 3000 Kbps up until 30 - 40 MB, then the speeds drops to about the half.

There's a provider, that unfourtunately doesn't deliver in my neighberhood, that even takes it to 8 Mbps downstream, 256 Mbps ustream, which is far faster then cable. In fact, they come out on top in the monthly providertest here.
http://www.xs4all.be/

So ADSL as a technology is just as good. It uses a regular phoneline (PSTN line) However, theres a limit (i believe its 5 kilometers or about 3 miles) in how far you can live from the amplifier or whatever it's called.
Cable should deliver about 4400 kbps downsstream. But i've heard quite a few people complaining about the speed. I'm not an expert on that, but i've heard the speed can drop substantially on peakmoment.

All these speeds aren't guaranteed. :( If you take a business account, it's somewhat more expensive, but you get guaranteeds speed. So it's worth asking some people from your neighborhood about there experiences

You can usually get a pretty good estimate of your dl/ul speeds here, also I think you can enter your zipcode and see what people get around you...

http://www.dslreports.com/stest

Ive never used cable but like you already know cable is limited bandwidth per neighborhood. But researching DSL you can get just about anything you want as far as speed, it just gets costly. The more you want to pay the better the speeds, and I think the more IPs you can get too. From what I remember DSL has moved to a dynamic IP setup now so if you have had your static IP for awhile you can keep it but now if you want a static its more costly.


Jason

If you are running a webserver that gets more than 100 users in a year(like most these personal sites do :eek: ) I suggest getting a T1, $300-$1000 a month for (i think it is 32x cable) and super upgrades from there. T2 is like 28 T1s, and T3 is like 80 T1s (but they cost more than most people make) A T3 line can support microsoft companies comfortably, that give u an idea? :-}

Jason:
But researching DSL you can get just about anything you want as far as speed, it just gets costly.

Not necessarely true. It more depends on the providers in your neighberhood. XS4all is about 2.5 times faster then my current provider, and they just charge 2 euro more.

Telenet, the cable-provider here, already did some testing on limiting speed to about 3Mbps. If i can believe the rumours they will do so to spread the bandwith more evenly between clients in the some neighberhood.
Since it costs more to bring cable to the clients then just upgrading existing phone-infrastructure, i believe DSL has most potential for non-commercial users.


mattover-matter:
If you are running a webserver that gets more than 100 users in a year(like most these personal sites do ) I suggest getting a T1, $300-$1000 a month for (i think it is 32x cable) and super upgrades from there.
:confused: :confused: One user in 3 days requires T1? What is T1?

The "t" series are VERY fast modems usually split and shared. a medium-sized company can all share a T1 company. I think there are T6s out, but that would cost like 10,000 a month :)

Originally posted by mattover-matter
The "t" series are VERY fast modems usually split and shared. a medium-sized company can all share a T1 company. I think there are T6s out, but that would cost like 10,000 a month :)

?????

*shakes head*

T-? are not modems... They are phone line specifications... For example:

T-1 carrier - A dedicated phone connection supporting data rates of 1.544Mbits per second. A T-1 line actually consists of 24 individual channels, each of which supports 64Kbits per second. Each 64Kbit/second channel can be configured to carry voice or data traffic. Most telephone companies allow you to buy just some of these individual channels, known as fractional T-1 access.
T-1 lines are a popular leased line option for businesses connecting to the Internet and for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) connecting to the Internet backbone. The Internet backbone itself consists of faster T-3 connections.

T-1 lines are sometimes referred to as DS1 lines.

Also it should be pointed out that there is no T-6 Carrier Specification...

Your T-? Carrier lines stopped with the T-4, of those T-1's and T-3's are the most popular and widely used... T-1's and T-3's do not use a conventional modem (that is a device that modulates and de-modulates an analog signal into a digital signal and vice-versa), instead or rather they use a digital connection device - CSU/DSU (customer switching unit/digital switching unit) - to connect to four wires to carry the information. Most small Internet providers have a T1 (or a fractional T1) line as their broadband Internet connection. A Full T1 broadband Internet access line should accommodate from one to over 200+ users.

After your T-? Carrier lines come the OC-?, or Optical Carrier Lines... These are fiber optic line's carrying 155 megabits per second...

Generally the speed break down appears as such:

T-1/DS1: 1.5 Mbps*
T-3/DS3: 45 Mbps*
OC1**: 51.84 Mbps*
OC3: 155.52 Mbps*
OC12: 622.08 Mbps*
OC24: 1.244 Gbps***
OC48: 2.488 Gbps***
OC192: 10 Gbps***
OC256: 13.271 Gbps***
OC768: 40 Gbps***

* - Mbps is represented as megabits per second as opposed to megabytes per second...
** - OC1 sets the base rate for the Optical Carrier Line...
*** - Gbps is represented as gigabits per second as opposed to gigabytes per second...

-sage-

I just want to step in and put the record straight on speeds here. You do NOT need a T1 if you have only 100 visitors per year.

Let's say a typical webpage on your site is 50k. 10 users hitting at the same time hence download 500k. However, these users are not going to get that page in one second. Some will be on dial-up 56k modems. Others will be on ADSL or cable :D

So, how long for that 50k? probably around 12secs for 56k modem (around 5k/sec) and 2secs for DSL equivalent (around 50k/sec).

But, we don't mind it being a bit slower. So. How many users can we support simultaneously on an ADSL connection...? Well, let's say 256k upload (which is standard for ADSL). That's Kbits, remember! Divide by 8 to get Kbytes. = 32k/sec. So, we can serve around 5 average users AT ONE MOMENT IN TIME.

That means that unless your site pushes more than 5 SIMULTANEOUS users consistently, you can make do with ADSL.

Now, that's looking on a per-second basis. You could easily have 1000 users per hour and not have problems (average = only 16 per minute!) so long as they were nice and waited their turns :p

The trouble is, things don't work like that. People tend to come along all at once, at peak times. When looking at bandwidth, you always need to figure out what your maximum demand will be (like electricity). Also, what overheads do your pages have? That's more of a server-spec question, but still needs to be factored in somewhere ;)

So, the figure of 100 per year is totally, totally out.

Now for the info about the speeds themselves. By the way, only modems are modems! That's for 56k and to a certain extent DSL and cable (called modems but actually they are network cards, basically.) Leased lines such as T1s use network cards, NOT MODEMS.

Here's some info:



Bandwidth Comparison and Reference Guide
NORTH AMERICA, JAPAN, KOREA, ETC.
Service Voice Channels Speed
DS0 1 64 Kbps
DS1 (T1) 24 1.544 Mbps
DS1C (T1C) 48 3.152 Mbps
DS2 (T2) 96 6.312 Mbps
DS3 (T3) 672 44.736 Mbps
DS4 (T4) 4032 274.176 Mbps
EUROPE (ITU)
E1 30 2.048 Mbps
E2 120 8.448 Mbps
E3 480 34.368 Mbps
E4 1920 139.264 Mbps
E5 7680 565.148 Mbps

SONET CIRCUITS
Service Data Rate (Mbps)
STS-1 OC1 51.84 (28 DS1s or 1 DS3)
STS-3 OC3 155.52 (3 STS-1s)
STS-3c OC3c 155.52 (concatenated)
STS-12 OC12 622.08 (12 STS-1s, 4 STS-3s)
STS-12c OC12c 622.08 (12 STS-1s, 4 STS-3c's)
STS-48 OC48 2488.32 (48 STS-1s, 16 STS-3s)

ITTU-T Data Rate Payload Rate
STM-1 155.52 150.336
STM-3 466.56 451.008
STM-4 622.08 601.344
STM-6 933.12 902.016
STM-8 1244.16 1202.688
STM-12 1866.24 1804.032
STM-16 2488.32 2405.376

ETHERNET
10 Base T 10 Mbps
100 Base T 100 Mbps
Gigabit 1 Gbps


There is NO T6. It only goes up to T4. And you can get ADSL that is faster than T1, however that is asynchronous so it would be better to get SDSL :)

I hope that clears some things up :cool:

::] krycek [::

mattover-matter, please try to check your info before posting. Speculation does not help anyone, and can easily confuse.

lol, well done sage, you beat me to it :p

I took 20 minutes writing my post :(

::] krycek [::

By the way, this may prove of some interest:

http://www.sciencegems.com/HSG/AATimeCalc.html

:)

::] krycek [::

LOL... np man... It took me some time to, just going back and rechecking my info as well... ;)

I like the way yours is formatted as well... :p

-sage-

Ok, T-1s are very fast isp providers? :D

I was doing that from memory, so I knew i'd be a bit off :rolleyes:

No matt.. As I said, they are phone line specifications... The service provided by them depends specifically on what the person/organization, utilizing the line, decides to do with them... Some people use them to setup an ISP, other's use them for corporate pipelines and others use them for personal broadband access... There are many other uses for them as well...

-sage-

It's funny to see all you guys talk about T1s and T3 and ADSL.

You know what speed i got? 1Kbps maybe 2kbps if I am lucky. How do you like that? And you know how much ADSL cost is Russia?

64Kbps (in and out) 100mb of traffic

$45

additional MB cost 0.09 cents

I hope you understand whyi don't have ADSL! :rolleyes:

No worries man... It's about the same price here (sometimes more) for the exact same service... Have you looked into ISDN (if it's still supported that is)??? I believe the price of that took a nose dive...

Besides, I may talk about T1's and T3's but I most certainly don't have one ('cept at work... Whoo Hooo... But no games... :()...

At home I have a Cable Modem, service $54 a month...

-sage-

There are rather many 10 Mbit/s Ethernet ISPs, too - that's what I have. Since it's 28 connections sharing 10Mbit/sec, and 40 of those sharing a 100Mbit/sec connection to the backbone, the max download varies from a top of 1.5Mbit/s (What I've managed to cram out of it, anyways) down to about .4 Mbit/s.

But then everything is slussed through the university network and the national univertity network, so there are some drops in speed when you want to access far-off locations. Also, sometimes the connection must travel across the atlantic and back to reach some geographically quite near location because the univerity network is separate from the commersial networks, and have it's own backbone.

Before even thinking about DSL, go to you local phone provider's website and look for their DSL offering. Enter your phone number and find out if it even POSSIBLE for you to get DSL.

I had to wait several years to get a cable modem, since my phone wires are so pitiful that DSL is not possible at my home. For that same reason, I stay with Cable instead of Satellite TV, since the only way to get reasonable($) cable modem service is to use their TV cable also.

Originally posted by FrogieA
Before even thinking about DSL, go to you local phone provider's website and look for their DSL offering. Enter your phone number and find out if it even POSSIBLE for you to get DSL.

I had to wait several years to get a cable modem, since my phone wires are so pitiful that DSL is not possible at my home. For that same reason, I stay with Cable instead of Satellite TV, since the only way to get reasonable($) cable modem service is to use their TV cable also.

hmm .. I listed a few reasons for someone not qualifying for DSL, are there more? Those came off the top of my head.

cable for obvious reasons has easier access, but you have to get one of those little speaker looking things installed.

satellite, very cool because you can always be online on a laptop or something, but I havnt a clue how fast it is.
I use satellite TV and they advertise "high speed internet" but they never ever say how fast it is, can you believe that? :( hehe

(can you tell im broadband illiterate? :D :D :D)










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