CNET News reported On one side are middle-income and price-sensitive households, which tend to favor DSL service offered by phone companies. On the other are more affluent families, which gravitate toward higher-speed cable modem services.
I suspect a lot of it is desceptive advertising by the phone companies that imply that their DSL service is the same as what Cable Companies provide. DSL is certainly much faster than dialup, but it is not anywhere near as fast as Cable Broadband.
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Nor do I believe that DSL is that much less expensive. We're talking on the order of $10 or $12 a month, here.
I actually had DSL service "way back when" it was first offered in the Houston area--the second one in my rather large neighborhood to have it installed.
For that time--late 1998--it was more than speedy enough. But when I moved to a new home not far away, I found that DSL was not available, and wouldn't be for at least a year(that one year turned out to be more than two years).
For awhile, I used the Starband satellite system, which was fairly expensive, not nearly as fast as even DSL (especially uploads) and erratic whenever the weather turned rainy.
One day, I got the word that cable modem service was available. I ordered that, and I've never looked back, even when I received the "happy news" the DSL was now available.
DSL has been slower to catch on mostly because of availability limitations as well as the speed which never seemed to come up to expectations.
The biggest problem with DSL is that it depends on your distance from the local telco "wire center". If you are almost across the street from your wire center, you may get 1.5mbps, but speed drops off as distance increases, such that at the maximum distance of 3.4 miles, it is just 384kbps.
Also they sometimes deceptively offer an even lower price with a slower speed, and lock you in to a year contract.
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