[geeks] cable modem or verizon DSL (in Rhode Island)?

[Phil Stracchino]

On Tue, Nov 18, 2003 at 10:51:06AM -0500, William Enestvedt wrote:
> I'm ignerunt, so if anyone could give me a hand choosing between Cox Cable and
> Verizon DSL for broadband, I'd be grateful.
>    I'm vaguely aware of the differences in the services, but I'm frankly
> overwhelmed by the dilemma of choosing among two of my least favorite
> monopolies.


Personally, I'd take DSL -- especially SDSL -- over cable every time.
I'm a big fan of SD In the real world, you never attain the advertised
data rates for cable anyway because you're sharing the marketed
bandwidth with 10,000 other people, plus cable operators tend to be very
anal about what you're allowed to do with your service (no servers,
etc).  With DSL, you have at least some reasonable expectation of
receiving something close to the advertised data rate you're paying for
(with SDSL you can even actually rely on having the claimed bandwidth
available, all the time, barring outages), and latency is usually pretty
good.

The above is of course MHO, backed only by personal experience.

As for the "modem" (I hate the bastardization of that term), it depends
what they're offering you and what you plan on hooking to it.  If you're
planning on running everything through a designated firewall box, you'll
only need one port off the wire, so the vendor equipment is probably
worth the [free] price.  On the other hand, if you're going to just plug
it into an "appliance" router anyway, why bother with the middleman?



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