New here... with a problem of course.

Since your provider is set to become either Comcast or Time Warner on the horizon, and Adelphia is not in super helpful mode leading up to the sale, you may have to wait and hope. Not sure about the actual problem, sorry.

dj

I am not very smart when it comes to all the tech talk involved in ISP.

I have a Motorola SB5100 and my service provider is Adelphia. My

connection is good for a while when I am connected, but then the speed

drops severely for a few seconds. This isn't a big deal when I am on

the internet, but it kills me when i am on XBOX live. I get kicked out

of games because my speed drops. It is really frustrating. I have had

the cable service for about 4 months, and during the first 2 nothing

like this happened. Could it be the modem? I can give you more

information if you need it. Thanks for the help.

More likely it is someone else on your node 'sucking bandwidth'. Frankly, DSL is better for gamers.

ADSL is also shared. Only the copper pair between the subscriber and DSLAM isn't shared. I was recently working on some ADSL systems. On them, 2 DS3s where shared among 448 subscribers, each configured for 3 MB down. That works out to 2 * 45 Mb / 448, less ~15% ATM overhead or about

it sounds like your node maybe over populated. The node is where all the connections in your area go before connection to the sever. Hey, it could be the sever also.

This is decidedly NOT the norm. One can usually expect a more dependable latency and ping time from DSL. Of course ALL internet connections are shared, at some point.

What are you basing that on? My observations are from actually working on the DSLAM shelves. The equipment I was running acceptance tests on , only supports a maximum of 4 DS3 connections, which at 45 Mb/s each, means the system is capable of a maximum of 180 Mb. So, even with all 4 DS3s in use, if each users was doing a lot of downloads, they'd only get about 340K b/s. Since in these installations, they were only using 2 DS3s, that works out to 90 Mb/s total or 170K, should everyone be downloading at once.

Which is still better for each customer than the 30mbps of most cable lines, before 100 or so customers are online. If the cable provider doesn't overload a node (some don't), there is little problem. Nevertheless, cable is usually subject to more fluctuation of bandwidth, and latency, than DSL. Most gamers are more concerned with response than massive data flow.

If you look at bandwidth/users, I think you'll find similar numbers either way. As for latency, that's one of the things we measured in the acceptance tests using ping. The spec called for 16 - 18 mS to the router. A quick test to my cable ISPs router shows about 6 - 8 mS, so the latency, (here anyway) is less for cable.

Has anyone actually performed comparison tests, between ADSL and cable? Of course to be accurate, you'd have to do the tests multiple times and on multiple ISPs. Bear in mind that how the ISP has configured the network (including bandwidth/user) will have a great impact on performance, regardless of the technology used.