Best internet

[hitman]

Is cable TVs better than the phone companies high speed?

[RUSHARP2]

I am really liking U-Verse by AT&T. Had it 3 months now and it is great. Had Time Warner before and it was ok but spotty service.

[Pat Miles]

With cable TV internet you will be sharing the "line" with others in your neighborhood or area. You will be sharing one coaxial cable from their distribution point. The more folks who are sharing drops the baud rate available to you when other folks are online. The Telcos line into your house will be a private twisted pair all the way from the central office, digital or fiber remote or stinger whichever one you feed out of. Your speed from the telco will remain constant.

Give both a call and ask if they will guarantee the speed they are advertising. If memory serves me right the cable company states that their speeds are "up to" a certain speed while the Telco offers a range of speeds of which you pick the one you want and pay for that particular speed. Best bet is to call them and ask the hard questions and keep asking til you get a hard answer.

Pat

[lmccrock]

Probably boils down to whatever company has the best customer service. In the places I lived, that was the phone company, but YMMV. I hear some telcos have pretty bad customer service.

Lee

[hitman]

A Time Warner modem showed up in the mail last Fri.

Called them about speeds and pricing, didnt sign up yet but it looks like they offer the best deal, 24 bucks for 6 MBS.

I guess the girl hit something she shouldnt have, did call and find out if I was signed up and they said no.

Looks like I got a free high speed modem.

[Jonathan Taliani]

We've had good luck with Time Warner. Best price and service in our area.

[angus6]

We have used DSL and cable and I'm finding the cable to have more constancy in speed , that said I'd love AT&T to get dsl service to me so I could tell the cable company what they could do with their high prices

[PHolsted]

This is a loaded question. In general you will find that cable will out perform ADSL. Most companies only offer 12 meg over ADSL while cable will generally offer up to 24 Meg. With cable you could have times when there is a high usage in your area and see slower speeds but this depends on the number of subscribers on a route before it reaches a headend. The same can be said for ADSL. If you are 12K' from the dslam and have old copper cable plant in the ground you will not be able to get the best speeds. Plus most Telcos oversubscribe their dslams. If you are in a very urban area and around 5k' or less you may be able to get VDSL and have speeds up to 24 Meg. In the end to know who base the best service you need to call the provider and ask lost of questions. But more important is to try and find a local tech working in the area and talk to them. More times than not they know the area and how many call outs they get for slow speeds.

[carbojacob]

In the market there is available different Internet providers who provides the Internet services as per your requirement. I prefer to use the service of the AT&T because its accurate facilities and beneficial plan. Another thing is that AT&T provides the best services which helps to surfing the Internet as its maximise speed in reasonable charges.

[Graham Smith]

With cable TV internet you will be sharing the "line" with others in your neighborhood or area. You will be sharing one coaxial cable from their distribution point. The more folks who are sharing drops the baud rate available to you when other folks are online.

True. Also, coax is subject to electromagnetic interference from power supplies, radio towers, etc, all of which effects the quality and speed of your signal.

The Telcos line into your house will be a private twisted pair all the way from the central office, digital or fiber remote or stinger whichever one you feed out of.

Um, sort of right but not completely. Between the telco and your house are going to be a lot of junctions. When it comes to POTS (plain old telephone system) copper lines, there can be a few or a lot depending on where you live. Also, if you are getting DSL over POTS, the signal degrades and the speed degrades the further you are from the telco. POTs lines are also effected by electromagnetic interference. Fiber optic is generally free of a lot of these problems if you can get it.

Give both a call and ask if they will guarantee the speed they are advertising. If memory serves me right the cable company states that their speeds are "up to" a certain speed while the Telco offers a range of speeds of which you pick the one you want and pay for that particular speed.

To the best of my knowledge, no one is going to guarantee you a speed. They will always give up a top speed (up to) but not a low end, they could claim pretty much anything the technology would allow. In my experience, Telco DSL advertised speeds are usually lower than cable or fiber optic because POTS lines and DSL have a physical limit they will never be able to go beyond and if you opt for a DSL line that is 3mbps up and 768kb down, you will likely get something close to that speed depending on how close you are to the telco. Fiber can probably get you faster speeds and is also fairly likely to give you a speed close to what they say you will get.

AS I UNDERSTAND IT... Cable can be a little dicier. In this area, they advertise several packages that include some kind of speed boost. Basically cable is capable of some pretty impressive speeds using signal compression and decompression but to keep their bandwidth from being flooded by people streaming movies they throttle the signals based on the speed you are paying for. If you have speed boost, they give it the gas for the first X MB of data so if you are transferring a large file, it will likely come through faster, but that doesn't work if you are streaming a signal.

FWIW, with streaming video and all, fights over bandwidth and just what service providers can and cannot do is becoming a really heated debate. That's what this whole net neutrality thing is all about.

My home internet is DSL 3MBPS and I stream Netflix movies just fine most of the time. But if I were trying to stream HD, I'd want something closer to the 5-7MB range. Anything beyond that is probably a waste because the devices receiving the data (computer, tv box, etc) can't handle anything beyond a certain level. Also, if you are streaming over wireless in your house, you're probably only at about the 5MBPS level anyway.

Your mileage may vary.

Edited December 16, 2010 by Graham Smith

[-JQ-]

I used Current for a while (moved out of area). They provide interwebs over your electrical service. You plug a "modem" into the AC outlet and an RJ45 to your PC and viola'...pretty neat. I haven't heard much from them recently though and they aren't available here.

Anyone else used them?

[Pat Miles]

I used Current for a while (moved out of area). They provide interwebs over your electrical service. You plug a "modem" into the AC outlet and an RJ45 to your PC and viola'...pretty neat. I haven't heard much from them recently though and they aren't available here.

Anyone else used them?

As of late companies offering BPL, broadband over power lines, have been closing up due to low demand by the public. The majority of them came into existence by way of either local or federal grant money as a way of providing cheap internet service. When the grant money ran out the income was just not there, thus their demise. Problems with baud rate irked customers who eventually left. Additional problems with significant interference to amateur radio operators which led to lawsuits against the BPL companies hastened their demise.

Pat

[wgnoyes]

Is cable TVs better than the phone companies high speed?

I don't know. They all fall on their faces from time to time.