Stubwub wrote:
So the reason for the slow speeds at the same periods of the day every day is because the cable company sucks. Not because I live in a heavely populated area with many using cable internet?
I find that hard to believe. But if you say so..
It's both. The cable guy is telling you the truth, but also misleading you at the same time. Yes. The slowness is because there are too many people all trying to use the same section of network.
I was not saying that cable will never have a slowdown problem due to numbers of customers in an area. My point is that this is *not* a feature specific to cable internet systems. You are getting slowness during peak hours because your cable company has chosen to funnel too many customers into a single switch from the cable line(s). Period. They could reduce that if they wanted to. It has *nothing* to do with the cable technology. It's a choice made by the company. In your case, your cable company has chosen to put too many homes on a single loop, causing slowness. That's why your cable company sucks.
DSL is no different. If I'm a sucky DSL company, I can just as easily take each of those single unshared lines from people's homes, and funnel them into a set of switches that can't handle the volume and you'll see *exactly* the same slowdown during peak hours that you'll see on cable systems. The issue of bandwidth is a simple choice of the transmission rate of packets between any section of your network and any other section. The chokepoints are always going to be any switch that's shared (which all networks have). Your speed will be based on the slowest chokepoint between you and your ISPs backbone connection. That chokepoint's slowness will be determined by the number of simultaneous users trying to pass through it. It absolutely does not matter what kind of physical layer you are using. The physical layer will affect the transmission rate of any single connection, but has *nothing* to do with shared bandwidth issues.
That's why it's a myth. I never said that cable never has a problem with shared bandwidth. Only that it's no more likely to be a problem with a cable system then with any other. That's why earlier in this thread, I specified that if both services were of similar relative quality, the cable service is generally "better" (assuming the price is ok, which it isn't in this case). That's because if the cable company knows what it's doing and sets up their network correctly, there wont be any bandwidth problems, and the physical layer they're using allows for a better transmission speed overall.
The real issue is that a cable ISP has to ***** up their switch setup in order for the customer speed to be as slow as the "fastest" speed you can get from DSL *if* you have an ideal DSL distance *and* your DSL company hasn't screwed up their switch setup. Everything else being equal, cable will provide a better service. It usually costs more though...
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