Moving from DSL to Cable

I think, for gaming purposes, ping time is more important than UL rate. Satellite is a poor medium for online gaming, even though it compares favorably with cable or DSL for data rates; the ping time for the 52,000 mile round trip of the signal is worse that on dial-up; or so I am told.

I've played some online multiplayer games over a DSL connection, and seen my ping times come in under 200 ms; but I have no experience with cable ping times.

I don't think that is true so much, any more. I understand that early cable connections weren't capped, and a handful of bandwidth hogs, pushing and pulling multimedia files, could kill the download rates. I believe the reason that cable companies now cap speeds is to try and apportion the bandwidth among customers more equitably. That statement is not based on factual knowledge, though.

Unthrottled uploads can drag downloads into the dial-up range. I've seen that happen on BitTorrent downloads with a client that which I couldn't configure to throttle the upload. When UL hit the ISP limit, DL was real slow. On a 1500/256 DSL connection.

Fair enough...

Why don't you try both, and cancel one after trying? Of course you'll need to make sure you can cancel after within 30 days with the cable provider.

I believe latency (ping time) is more important than bandwidth for gaming.

Somewhat. This will be extremely local in place and time. A bigger issue is that as the pipe gets filled up with traffic, your packets will have to wait.

-- Robert

That's what I'm about to do, I'm going to run parallel systems for about a short time and then make my decision which way to go. I'm just doing my research now by soliciting experiences from people who've lived with the issue longer than I'll have.

That seems to be the consensus and I suppose it makes sense since the payload for client messages is pretty small and mostly tokenized, it's not real bandwidth intensive. Round-trip time is probably more significant. Here, the issue is going to be what kind of queuing and delay of packets am I likely to see as a result of over-saturation in a cable environment. I've never had to worry about that with my synchronous, non-shared DSL circuit. This should be pretty apparent and easy to compare once both systems are in. There used to be a site called DSLReports that useful for monitoring throughput, it should be able to give me a decent benchmark comparison of the two. Any other sites you (or anyone else reading this) are familiar with?

Hmm, hope that's not a big problem here. The cable is coming in tomorrow, I'll report back here on my early results once I get some tests under my belt.

Thanks,

I had DSL for several years and then switched to cable. I would never go back to DSL. Cable is much faster. Also no latency.

Rick

Bob Perez wrote:

Rick wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@corp.supernews.com:

I had cable and would never switch back. Now that I've said that I can say it's not because of technical issues. Speed wise I can't tell the difference, my DSL service is 1.5 down and 256 up. Any speed issues have been with specific web sites and not my ISP. Latency, I don't know anything about it and I don't care about it. Cable cost me 3 times what DSL does. I had good service from the cable company until I had a problem on Memorial Day weekend and needed tech support. The best either the cable company or Road Runner could do for me was to leave a message for someone to call me after the holiday. After the holiday I called the phone company and got DSL installed within a couple weeks. A month later I told the cable company what they could do with their cable and I've been happy ever since.

"Bob Perez" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@news.supernews.com:

I see you are already doing one thing I would suggest, run both for a month and see which one you like better.

You should also check whenther the rate the cable company is giving you is an introductory rate that will go up at a certain point in time. My local cable company charges 3 times what the phone company charges for internet service

That is interesting. My DSL service and cable service were almost the same price. However, I do know that Horizon Cable in CA is about 1/2 of what I pay. So go figure.

Rick

Used to be? I think you can still get there with the old URLs, but they were pushing their new name for a while:

It took my two weeks and a day to beat SBC into fixing a telephone problem. It was only evident at night, but they would not roll a truck when the problem was evident. It made voice conversation extremely difficult, to impossible. A loud audible noise that overwhelmed voice, and killed modem traffic. It even bled over to the DSL side, making the modem lose sync every two to three minutes. The DSL people got involved, left a later model DSL router over night for a test; but it would still drop out during the outage. Do you think they will give us a pro-rated bill for the down time?

Rick wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@corp.supernews.com:

I guess it depends on how you look at it and I need to clarify things. Cable modem service is $45 per month if you have at least the $40 per month cable TV service also. If you get cable modem service without cable TV service then the cable modem service is $87 per month. Since I haven't had cable TV for years I figure cable modem service at $87 per month. DSL is $30 per month. I was willing to pay the $87 until I was told that for that price someone could leave a message for tech support. I almost never use tech support but for $87 per month I expect them to say how high when I tell them to jump.

DSLreports is good. But I have a little freeware program that reports seed all of the time. It's called "netmeter". Good little program. If you aren't connecting it goes away. If you areconnecting for any constant speed at all it uses a little graph plus text. Small window, can resize even smaller to put out of the way.& always on top. & can make it transparent and click-through-able. Like right now as I type this I am also playing online poker and my upload speed is 3 Kbps & download speed the same (averages it out, but can set to report exact). When downloading like a movie from Usenet I have been able to figure out the number of connections to enter into my newsreader for optimum performance. (BTW it is 7 connections on Astraweb using Comcast).

...D.

Here's a better saying: A penny saved is a penny earned. Cable service here will be substantially cheaper than DSL service. I'm not changing for the sake of changing, god knows it's a pain in the ass. But the prospect that my performance might actually *improve* and be cheaper is just too enticing to ignore.

There is an old saying, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Is DSL doing the job for you? If yes, then stick with a known system, and let others see how reliable the cable internet service is.

Here in Cleveland, Ohio, I have found SBC Yahoo to be very reliable and it does the job. I know that many cable internet subscribers from the local company have experienced big problems from time to time. This is not a question of DSL technology vs cable internet technology. The real qustion is which operator is doing the better job.

I am sticking with SBC Yahoo DSL, and haven't even considered cable.

I just signed up today for Comcast buy back program for Dish users for a much cheaper price than Dish Network and Sprint DSL-T1 is costing me. I also will be tripling the speed and eventually Comcast will be increasing the speed to 4.0 in the very near future. I will actually get more stations with Comcast than I do with Dish Network. ghggomer.