DSL Vs. Cable Vs. Satellite Speeds
When choosing a broadband Internet provider, there are many choices out there that are suited for different needs. Three of the major broadband speed providers are DSL, cable Internet and satellite Internet. Depending on where you live, some or all of these options may be available for you, but they all come with their own pros and cons.
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DSL
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DSL is short for digital subscriber line and is a technology provided by the local telephone company over POTS, better known as plain old telephone service. Local telephone companies have a major advantage when providing DSL, because there is no installation necessary. By providing Internet service that rides on the existing telephone network, telephone companies can turn on an additional signal and allow users to get online at broadband speeds. The only setup includes a DSL modem (also known as a DSL bridge) and DSL filters for the telephone jacks.
Residential DSL service will range from 128 kb per second to 3 Mb per second. Most DSL will have a separate speed for upload, called asynchronous DSL. Finally, another factor in DSL speed is distance from the switching station. Due to the nature of copper with networking, a subscriber must be an X amount of feet from that switching station. The actual speeds received at the residence will degrade as the distance increases.
Cable Internet
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By the mid-2000s almost every cable company in the United States was providing broadband Internet. Cable Internet is based on the DOCSIS protocol and offers speeds between 1 Mb per second and 6 Mb per second. With DOSIS versions two and three implementations speeds have increased to 101 Mb per second. One caveat of cable Internet is the practice of "capping" bandwidth. By metering the usage, the companies ensure that "bandwidth hogs" do not use too much of the service and degrade that service to others.
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Satellite Internet
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Satellite is used mostly in rural areas where it neither DSL or cable company provided Internet is available. A satellite dish is mounted on top of the residence were the data stream is transmitted to a satellite and then beamed down back to the provider's station. Due to the long distances that the data must travel, latency is the biggest concern. One-way data transfer can have a latency of up to 900 ms. Due to this high measurement, any Internet intensive processes are rendered virtually useless. However, the download speed does greatly beat out dial-up access due to its maximum download rate of 1 Gb per second though the average speed is around 1 Mb per second.
Price
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While speeds are important, cost mostly determines choices for broadband Internet. Prices will vary greatly based on a number of factors: the provider, packages offered, location of where you live, and availability of services in your area. As competition has grown between companies, bundling has driven down prices for consumers if they choose to bundle multiple services with one company. The common bundling has offered to most consumers is usually called "triple play". These are normally a bundling of television, Internet and telephone and offering a substantial discount off of all three. This has given birth to the debate of whether it is prudent to put all vital household services with one provider in case of an outage.
Usage
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For most users, any broadband Internet speed will suffice. For checking email, surfing the Internet, searching items online or just chatting it up with friends, the speed will not matter whatsoever. Reliability is key, and for most people the difference between a 1 m/s connection and a 10 GB per second connection would never be seen. Given that most casual users use little bandwidth, pricing and reliability would be recommended as the top things to look for. For slightly more applications, such as watching online video, DSL and/or satellite would suffice. Cable Internet reaches some of the highest speeds available in the country. For applications such as video chatting or downloading large files, cable Internet would likely be the best solution. It would be wise to analyze what you're looking to do and then compare prices and availability of services in your area.
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References
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