Thinking of going DSLFollow

Errr, nevermind. This topic had absolutely nothing to do with Angelina Jolie's mouth...

Totem

Singall's basically got it all correct.

Performance will vary from place to place. But those performance differences are due to the specifics of how the local service providers cabling is constructed. It has nothing to do with the technology itself.

If your local cable company has screwed up wiring and very large loops, you'll see crappy performance and huge hits during peak times.

If your local phone company is still using wiring they installed back in the 60s, you're going to see crappy performance no matter what newfangled com-tech they're running over it.

As a general rule though, if both cable and dsl are of similar relative quality, you'll get more performance out of cable. It's just got a higher total potential throughput then dsl does.

The whole "but you're sharing a connection with cable!!!" is pure BS. Pssst! I'll tell you a secret. Unless you connect two computers via a null-cable of some kind you are *always* sharing a connection. That's the entire point of packet based communication. How far away from your computer your connection becomes "shared" is really irrelevant. So, with DSL, you have a single wire that travels X feet to a single point before connecting into a switch cloud. Big deal. I could run a similarly lengthed cable between my home router and my cable box and do the exact same thing. It's my line until it goes into a shared connection.

The only differece is that most cable loops act like hubs rather then switches. That has *zero* effect on speed though (usually anyway). It does, as Singall points out, have a security issue since you can see packets from other hosts on that same loop. However, if your security model relies on no one else seeing your packets, you're screwed anyway. It's pretty irrelevant except perhaps to find the IP addresses of your neighbors.


Your best resource is to talk to people in the area. Ask them which they use and which works better. If you're getting horrible service and performance with one, then switch to the other. There's no generic "X is always better then Y" answer to this question.

My cable was much faster, but DSL is considerably cheaper. Also Charter had a much quicker response time than SBC for line problems.

Aww contrary, moo fray. I think it displays a great degree of respect. In fact, I bet he was standing up and saluting before he found out Miss Jolie's mouth wasn't involved.

DSL is nothing but glorified ISDN... It sucks!

Funny, I sit on top of SONET rings all day. How about you?

Of course Gbaji is right, degredated wiring will always affect you no matter what, but the technology behind DSL SUCKS and on top of that, it relies on a static IP which is far less secure than a dynamic IP.

If you want to be secure over a cable connection you could set up a VPN tunnel to an anonymous proxy. For the most part, your traffic will look like garbled junk to your typical packet sniffing script kiddie.

http://www.buytelco.net/NetworkApplications.asp?ID=601

want me to find more, i can. the only thing that is simular to ISDN and xDSL is they both use copper and they both use audio to pass traffic.

xDSL is not always a static IP in fact most ISPs that offer xDSL offer their home accounts as dynamic IPs not static and they reserve the static IP for their business class vs of DSL.

both have their advantages and disadvantages, but for raw speed for a home user DSL is far better then the speeds you can get from a ISDN line.

no i do not sit on top of sonet ring all day, but for roughly 4 years i was the #1 installer, and trainer in the Central FL region for Bellsouth and Sprint for their DSL roll out. The technology is so different from ISDN it can not be compaired in anything other then it uses copper pairs and uses audio to transmit data, but then again so does a T1.

so by your statement T1s suck too.

Bellsouth was dynamic from the start.

as for max bandwidth, you are 100% correct coax vs twisted pair is no compairison. when cable first rolled out though it was the suxor due to the way it was cable down, 56k up, then they went to cable both ways, and the bandwidth was so screwed up due to the HUBs in place vs using SWITCHES that if your neighborhood had more then 5 people online at once, you were surfing at 56k speeds.

today most cable companies have spent a lot of money on upgrading from HUBs to Switches, and drastically increased the downstreem bandwidth.

currently in my area everyone is on 5m down and the base up is 384. the commercial accounts can now go up to 5/2m for a price.

Well. Yes and no. The hubs versus switches definately was a big deal (and led to the whole "but you're sharing a connection" issue in the first place). But to be fair, cable modem systems came out before DSL (competing phone tech at the time *was* ISDN), and switches were significantly more expensive in comparison to hubs back then. Today, you can buy a switch for pretty much the same price as a hub. In fact, it's hard to find hubs since there's not much reason to sell them anymore. Even just 5 years ago though the difference between the price was extreme. You could get a hub for about 1/10th the price of an equivalent port number switch. I think economics rather then performance lead that choice.

As to the coax versus tp argument, that's a bit iffy though. In theory, there's no reason why one would be better performance then another. Twisted pair reduces interferrence between the wires by twisting them around eachother (I'm not sure of the exact electromagnetic properties involved, but I'll trust the guys who say it works since it apparently does). Coax reduces interferrence by shielding one line from another. The primary difference is cost. At least when dealing with two mediums (outter and inner for coaz and two wires in a "twisted pair" arrangement).

The reason we think of twisted pair as better is because you can easily add more wires to the bundle, twist them, and be able to scale your total bandwidth as a result. So a 10Mb cable would utilize two wires (a classic "twisted pair"). A 10Mb coax cable could do the exact same thing (in fact, it's *better*, but costs more money). A 4 wire twisted bundle can provide 100Mb performance with similar interferrence resistance as a single pair can. But you can't just add wires to coax, so it's a dead end (unless you want to add layers of medium around eachother, but that becomes geometrically more expensive and you gain very little).

Honestly though, from a home users perspective, since you're pretty much never getting close to even 10Mb performance total, it's completely irrelevant which is used. For an office network though, TP is the standard. I do get ~100Mb performance (tested via real data read/write transfer calculations) on my work system. But there's no enough need for that on a home system to justify the costs involved in making it available.

Again. It's really more a matter of economics then technology.


Oh. Want to add one more thing. I'm not sure where the idea that dynamic IPs are more secure comes from. The reason dynamic is used is (drumroll...) because of economics. If you hand out static IPs, you have to have one set aside for every single customer, whether they are using it at that exact moment or not. This represents a significant overhead. ISPs *wanted* to use dynamic IP systems because it meant that they only needed to purchase enough IP addresses to cover the likely maximium number of customers that would be using their service at any given time. Worst case, it's the same number, but most of the time it's going to be significantly fewer.

The biggest obstacle to dynamic IP schemes was the computers people used at home. Most didn't have any sort of mechanism for dealing with dynamic IPs. This was quite a while before every system on the planet came installed with dhcp. So every ISP had to bundle up some sort of software for their customers to install that used dynamic IPs. That was an extra headache (knowing a number of guys who worked tech support for ISPs back in the 80s and 90s, this was a *huge* deal). It was a heck of a lot easier to simply mail the user a packet that included some basic modem software (if they didn't already have one), and a sheet of instructions telling them what IP to set their system to, including route, netmask, and dns numbers. But this was back in the days of dialup with SLIP and PPP connections used for internet connectivity, so things were a bit "strange"...


In terms of security, there's absolutely no difference between them. A static IP address is only going to increase your odds of being hacked if someone obtains that address and decides to go on some personal crusade to get *you*. That simply doesn't happen very often (and doesn't change the fact that you should have some sort of firewall to protect you anyway).

There are two most common methods that will result in your computer being hacked:

1. Automatic reverse-attack. You trigger something on the internet that automatically tracks back to your system and hacks it. This can be a packet sniffer out there that intercepts ACKs and uses them to obtain IPs to attack, or it can be simple downloaded viruses and worms. You click a button on a website, and that website has to know your IP in order to send you the data. If it sends a hack instead, it doesn't matter if your IP is static or dynamic. It's going to track back to whatever IP you are using at that moment.

2. Scanned attacks. In this case, a hacker sets up his program to scan a range of IP addresses for open ports that his hack program can exploit. Often, these are components of a worm program. An infected system, at some specific time scans an IP range and attempts to infect any systems it can. Whether you are using static or dynamic IP doesn't matter. If your address lies between X and Y numerically, it'll be scanned and attacked.


In the first case, you can protect yourself by having updated patches on your system, settings on your browser and mail reader that prevent uncertified programs from automatically running, and virus scanners (preferably one that scans any incoming data on the fly). In the second case, a firewall is needed in order to prevent a scan from finding an open port and sending a hack through it.

Neither are helped or hindered by the use of either static or dynamic IP addresses. The idea that you are somehow more secure because your IP address changes over time is silly. It might make it a bit harder for a site to block you via IP address, but that's about it. Any site that's going to redirect some kind of malicious code at your computer is going to do it right on the fly when you first identify yourself to it. The fact that a day or two later you'll have a different IP is totally irrelevant. It'll either hack your computer right there, or it wont. I'm not aware of any hack code out there that records someone's IP address and then waits a few days to initiate and attack. That would be a pretty silly way to go about hacking people...