DSL And Cable Beginning To Differentiate
from the slowly,-surely dept
For years, people considered DSL and cable to be pretty much interchangeable. However, now, each side is making some adjustments to their offerings to try to differentiate themselves. DSL is positioning themselves as cheap broadband access while cable internet providers are boosting speeds to position themselves as something of a premium, but speedy connection. Of course, these are somewhat artificial definitions, as either one could be speedy (or cheap) under proper circumstances. The real issue is whether or not people really care that much about the speed. Certainly, plenty of early adopter types do, but many folks just want the always-on connection, and if DSL is half the price of cable, they're going to get the business - that is, until applications become common that really require speed.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Another difference
Cable systems have a very limited upstream bandwidth, and that bandwidth is shared by up to a thousand users on each segment. With cable, it's real easy for a single user to fill up the upstream bandwidth and bog down all of the other users on the segment. Consequently, just about every cable ISP prohibits its users from running any kind of server, which would include P2P clients.
Each DSL user, on the other hand, has a fixed and dedicated amount of upstream bandwidth, and what one user does with the bandwidth won't affect other users.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
AUP is a big factor
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Another difference
[ link to this | view in thread ]
security and privacy
[ link to this | view in thread ]