I've finally got the financial means where I can upgrade to broadband and get rid of this thrice-damned dialup. :mad: :hammer:

The question is, which should I go with: cable modem, DSL, or something else? :confused:

Any suggestions?

I've used both and prefer cable. I had a really bad DSL provider and was constantly getting dropped connections, loss of service and slow download speeds. I would just price both in your area, find out what plans they offer and then go from there.

I have DSL, and both are availiable and priced the same here, but from what I can tell, Cable seems to be faster. (I was going to change but decided that the DSL is fast enough and I didn't need to change my e-mail, and set up etc for a bit faster service).

Each has its advantages and disadvantages. I had AT&T cable for 1 year, and Verizon DSL for just over 1 year.

A lot depends on the carrier. AT&T is by far and wide, the absolute #1 WORST I ever had. I was having downtime every week, or every 2 weeks if I was lucky. They always blamed the problems on me (which it never was), their support staff is absolutely the WORST I have used (most of their techs don't know their ass from a hole in the ground), and the customer service department might as well not even exist because they totally ignore customers.

Verizon DSL was great for me. Some of their staff is pretty clueless and have ZERO personality, but their uptime was 10 fold better than that pure $hit AT&T.

These days both cost just about the same. Cable CAN be faster, but there are multiple people on your block sharing a node, which limits transfer speed. If you sign on at 3 am, chances are you will get faster speeds than at 6 pm.

DSL doesn't work that way. There are no nodes. But the overall speed is usually a little less.

Shop around. Read reviews online. Ask other people in your area (if you can) what they think. Of course don't ask the company because they will tell what you want to hear. Even AT&T told me their support was top of the line, and after 1 year I was ready to go postal I hated them so much.

I've heard that Cox, Comcast, and some others are better, but experiences vary.

Personally I will never go back to cable. While the speed is nice, I found too many negatives. I don't like sharing a node, and the downtime was horrible. On top of that, when I called in to report it, the clueless incompetent techs had no idea what to do. The problem HAD to be my end.

Some DSL providers are that bad. I got both my line and ISP done through Verizon. I didn't want a third party ISP.

Check around. Ask others for their input for both cable and DSL. That's the only way to find out.

i think it just depends on the cable provider

they have two cable providers down here: telstra and optus
i've had them both....telstra had heaps of downtime, little cutoffs (especially annoying when playing online games),etc
optus on the otherhand has been virtually bulletproof! :D

i recommend asking people their opinion (who use it for more than email and a bit of web browsing)

I use cable at the moment and cannot complain at all. While Rogers was using the @Home network problems were relatively frequent. But since they put in their own infrastructure things have been fine.

Since I work for Bell Canada :) I should say that our DSL offering is pretty good. As soon as it is available in my area I will probably switch (because I'll get it for half the price). lol

In my experience there is very little difference between the two services. The only thing that does not excite me is the connection oriented aspect of DSL. I prefer the always-on cable setup. Still, you can avoid that with a DSL router anyway, so no big deal.

Like Aaron said .... Shop around, find out what best suits your needs (mind you that the differences are small). I just got DSL with a great company, good support, never any downtime (at least that's what several people have told me) & if I need a 2mbit connection I can have it boosted in less than 30 secs (for a small fee of coz) :thumb:

BTW Aaron, check this SITE (http://www.rinkworks.com/stupid/cs_stuptech.shtml) for some bad tech support :lol:

Smurfie... that entire page is a direct copy of www.rinkworks.com/stupid

I found that site while I worked in tech support from 98-2000. Whoever owns that link you sent me copied his entire page word for word.

Not a very bright move on someones part.

Whoa .... You're right Aaron. Thanx for heads-up, I changed the url in my previous post .... I hate copycats and leeches :mad:

I just did a quick Google search, coz I was actually looking for another site (that only contained tech support stories as well) I visited several months ago. Didn't find it, but thought that one was close enough :)

I just find it so retarted that people copy ENTIRE web sites, or even cut and paste several pages.

Where I work now, about 2 years ago the owner found a competitor on the east coast who copied our support pages. From what he said, the competitor used to be a customer.

Anyway, they copied our ENTIRE support section. You could tell it was cut and paste because even the misspellings were there (so obviously it wasn't retyped), and these idiots went as far as to use our screen shots! He clicked on one and an ftp screen shot came up with OUR hostname on THEIR page!

Their background colors and some graphics were different, but these idiots copied 100% of our support section, word for word, and all our screen shots.

We had a stack of pages showing what they stole from us. And to make matters worse, they had gotten away with it for at least 6 months, so who knows how much business they took from us.

The day they got the letter from our attorney their site went down with a message like "temporarily offline" or some lame damn thing. Within a few weeks they were gone.

We sued, they lost, and they are now out of business.

Never plagarize another site. The lawsuit isn't worth it.