So after my last rant about Comcrap, I thought I would go right into another rant about cable internet service in general. So this has been really driving me crazy, and pissing me off as well. I keep seeing these ads on TV about how RoadRunner is faster than DSL, and that it “Blows DSL away.” While in all technicality, this is a correct statement, it’s HIGHLY subjective. Let’s take a quick look at the differences between cable and DSL.

- With cable, you share your connection with all your neighbors, so if one of them is a very heavy user, your speed with drop like a rock. In comparison, DSL is a Digital Subscriber Line and you have a DEDICATED connection all the way back to a fiber backbone.
- And along with that, while it is true that the theoretical maximum speeds with cable are usually higher, in very few cases will you actually come close to the maximum speed that they advertise. With DSL, you will CONSISTENTLY see speeds very close to the maximum of your package. (NOTE: Both of these, however, can be affected by line noise!)
- Finally, and probably most importantly (especially if you are an online gamer), is the latency, or better know in the gaming world as lag. With cable, your connection is, for lack of a better term, “frogged around” to make it work. It will make hop after hop, and have to jump through a ton of hoops just to get from your computer to somewhere else on the internet. Once again, since with DSL you have a DEDICATED line, a good portion of this hopping is eliminated. You will see less latency, and snappier responses (in general) with a DSL connection then you could ever hope to achieve with your cable connection. (If you want more information about latency, see this article.)

Now while I can’t really say that TimeWarner is guilty of “false advertising” or anything of the sort, they most certainly are giving select (and misleading) information regarding the quality of cable internet connections. While it’s true that you MAY get a faster raw speed (assuming that none of your neighbors are home)….the quality of that connection is far surpassed by DSL, despite that fact that you may give up a bit of speed. So remember, don’t be swayed by the massive amounts of bandwidth offered by cable companies, because bandwidth is most certainly not everything, and just because DSL (in general) offers lower speeds, that does NOT be default make it worse….in most cases it will perform consistently better than cable.