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Original review 2006: Initially I applied for DSL and cable both, and each was unavailable. The first that became available was Cable from ATTBI. It was good. I felt that the fact that it shared a cable was an advantage in that any outage would affect a lot of people, and so get fixed faster. It had 1500 MTU. In those days, for DSL you had to run an application on your computer to do PPPoE. While cable was more expensive, I felt it was probably better. It did have packet loss at times, which I learned was due to upstream frequency ingress. ATTBI was bought by Comcast. I had come to expect that less than 0.5% packet loss was OK, and that 1% was tolerable. I wrote my own logging program that would ping my Comcast gateway, and I later ran Ping Plotter continually (I still do, but not because of any problem). Near the end I was getting >5% loss frequently, and two service calls did not fix it, I decided to try DSL. My expectations were that the DSL would have some packet loss, and that the Usenet and Email of the DSL would be inferior. DSL very much exceeded my expectations. Packet loss was non-existent. Theoretically slower (3 MB vs 4 MB, it felt as least as fast. And while the Usenet and Email were not quite as good as for Comcast, they very much exceeded my expectations. Personal web space of Geocities with ads was a step down, but that was not important. The free dialup for contingency or travel and even some free 802.11 hotspots is a plus. Newer DSL modems do the protocol stuff for you, and the 1492 MTU is not significant. I upgraded DSL to 6MB. That felt similar for browsing, but it gave faster downloads. Latencies are low. SN margin dropped about 8 dB, but packet loss is only about 0.01% -- less that 1 lost ping per day pinging every 10 seconds, but up from zero. I have friends with problem-free Comcast and DSL. The better choice will vary at different locations. The Ameritech/SBC/ATT folks are much more forthcoming and proactive with information about problems or outages, especially at DSL Reports. I just read of outages. They have not affected me so far. Update 2008 September 29 Still doing well, enjoying the reliability. Usenet servers do fine with me, altho high-volume users might think otherwise. Email has improved, but the main thing is connectivity. And that is really nice. Incoming email is very good, and I make good use of AddressGuard. There was a problem with SMTP, but that has improved to where I seldom need to use a workaround. Having customer support available via DSLR is really nice too. Update 2013: I have moved to ATT U-verse 18 Mb internet going to a higher speed. This review is for the 6 Mb (actual about 5 due to overhead) regular DSL I dropped. Over my 6 or so years with DSL, it was very reliable. The Yahoo email servers were a little problematic for the first couple years, but they have been behaving well. So I raised my services mark. Pings on my fastpath DSL were about 10 ms. On U-verse they are higher because there is always some interleaving. From a normal web browsing, the regular DSL felt peppy as peppy as the U-verse, but the U-verse is better for watching video etc. member for 22 years, 6493 visits, last login: 81 days ago updated 11.1 years ago |