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Cable is usually faster, but is that your only criteria? That is about the only advantage cable has over DSL. I really believe the technology behind DSL is much more scalable and reliable than cable. Cable is shared acess on the wire so everyone in your neighborhood shares the connection back to the cable company. With DSL, each subscriber is on their own cable pair back to the central office. What that means is that the more people in your neighborhood that gets cable, the slower it is. DSL does not have that limitation.
When I had cable I had many more outages. We just had an electrical storm here last night and the power flickered, my neighbors with cable had no internet access, the DSL never dropped. I have had 2 brief outages in the past year with DSL. When I was on cable I must have had averaged 2 outages a month, one time lasting over 10 hours.
The other thing to look at are what services the ISP provides. I know Comcast does not offer their own Usenet for example, only a limited 1 gig a month transfer through Giganews. My DSL provider has full unlimited Usenet access which was a real selling point for me since I have been using Usenet since the early 90s. Another service, if they do have an outage or you are away on a trip, my DSL provider also gives me a dialup connection for free. If my cable went out, I had no internet access period.
Another point, I have satellite, the cable company wants to charge me more for internet access since I am not a cable subscriber.
Overall I am a lot more happy with DSL. Most of the times I do not even notice the speed difference. Usually the speed you get is dependant on the site you are downloading from. If I am on a large site like apple.com downloading a movie trailer it is a little slower, but on another site with limited bandwidth, I can tell no difference.
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