High Speed DSL vs. Cable

Freakinchair

Hey guys,

Im in a bit of a bind here. I live in Quebec, Canada and am currently getting high speed DSL from Sympatico Bell. Our plan gives us unlimited download/upload amounts and 6gbs speed. Over the past (many, many) years weve had intermittent issues that build up over time. Every year or year and a half I need to call them because after 8:00 at night we'd be getting constant disconnects. After a couple of weeks of going back and forth they "fix" the problem. Of course, the problem was never completely fixed - I would still get one or two disconnects past 8:00, but thats manageable. Now the other day we received a phone call saying we were only getting 4.0 mbps speed and that they were going to up that amount to 6.1 - something that we should of already been getting. Of course, they do this and now after 8:00 we get hit with the horrible disconnect issues and are maintaining about 0.4mbps. Obviously we now know how theyre "fixing" our problem (by dropping our speed to minimum threshhold levels).

Thats the history of the problem. I don't want to have this problem anymore and am considering switching to another service. What I would like advice on is the differences between cable and DSL as I'm looking at getting a videotron cable modem installed.

I live in a semi rural community (if it makes a difference) and according to the Videotron website cable is available at my address.

So, questions:

Do cable connections suffer from disconnect issues, or any other possible issues (such as slowdown)?

Can cable modems support wireless routers? (we have multiple computers on the same wireless network currently, including laptops)

Does having a 100gb download ever become a problem? I don't download too much, just a couple of steam games a month or sometimes some highres videos.

Are there any other (better maybe?) services other than videotron that any of you know of on the quebec side?

Is it alot of trouble to switch ISP's? I know we are on a plan with Sympatico (which includes sattelite tv/cell phones and the current internet access), will changing ISP's destroy this plan or cause prices to skyrocket?

Finally, if you have any other comments or suggestions please share them.

*Also I have found that other people share the same problem with sympatico:
http://http://www.ehmac.ca/everything-else-eh/44564-sympatico-high-speed-slows-down-crawl-every-night.html

Thanks in advance

mastman

Do cable connections suffer from disconnect issues, or any other possible issues (such as slowdown)?

Shouldn't disconnect ever. The cable provider has hubs placed everywhere. Everyone connected to a hub shares bandwidth back to the cable company. Each individual connection to the hub has a speed limit. Technically it could have slowdowns, but you share a metrick fuckton of bandwidth and I haven't had any problems. In the end it all depends on the specific provider.

Can cable modems support wireless routers? (we have multiple computers on the same wireless network currently, including laptops)

Yup, wireless is fine. internets is internets

Does having a 100gb download ever become a problem? I don't download too much, just a couple of steam games a month or sometimes some highres videos.

Just depends on what you download. games are what like ~ 1GB each. HighRes full length movies are 3-7GB each.

bowen

Cable excels where DSL fails, and vice versa. Cable tends not to suffer from distance from the provider, but does suffer from node overload (multiple people being on at once watching porn) -- whereas DSL is the opposite, suffering from distance and not suffering from node overload. Other than that, though, really, high speed is high speed.

shutz

Like you, I'm with Sympatico High-Speed, and have the unlimited plan. Like you, I currently have an unlimited plan. Unlike you, I don't have any disconnect problems.

Now, here comes the warning: as far as I know, Bell don't offer any unlimited plans anymore. They don't want to cut us off for fear of losing us, but I've been told that if I switch to another plan, I'll lose my unlimited transfers privilege. Which means, if you go for Videotron, and then try to switch back, your new plan will include a monthly cap.

I'm almost sure that your disconnects have to do with something that occurs to the phone network in the area at a predefined time. The techs that try to fix it don't have access to the cause of the problem, so they only fix the symptoms, not the cause of the problem. If you have the patience, you can keep calling them everytime the problems occur, and insist on them fixing it. The more times you call, the more likely it is that they'll send you one of their best techs to fix things up properly.

Otherwise, yes, in your situation, Videotron might be a better option. I've had really bad experiences with them in the past, but in general, their Internet offering seems pretty solid, now. Just avoid their residential phone service for a few more years, as they're still working out the kinks, and you will have more problems with your phone than if you stay with Bell (Videotron's system is a lot more sensitive to bad phone wiring and cheap phones.)

Feral

bowen wrote: »

Cable excels where DSL fails, and vice versa. Cable tends not to suffer from distance from the provider, but does suffer from node overload (multiple people being on at once watching porn) -- whereas DSL is the opposite, suffering from distance and not suffering from node overload. Other than that, though, really, high speed is high speed.

I'll also point out that cable is usually better than DSL for older homes - in most homes, the phone wiring is older than the cable wiring, and if the home is particularly old then the phone wiring might be too flaky to support DSL.

In the OP's case, he's living a fair distance from town, he's having problems with DSL, and his current provider is known to have issues. I'd say it's worth it to try cable for a year.

sYnister

i was in the same bind. like you two, i am in Montreal with Sympatico's Unlimited High Speed Plan. unfortunately, my speed pitiful compared to my girlfriend on Videotron High Speed (my 300kbps(when im lucky not being capped at 30kbps) vs her easily 700-800kbps). she has a download limit of 100 Gb / month though and while i thought that that would hurt her in the long run, she is still able to download the shows that she wants (about 300Mbs each) and still stay well under the cap. i was going to change but my download history seems to go above 150 Gbs /month (i run a server) so i need to stay with bell even though they cap my ass like crazy. if i were you though, videotron all the way. good luck

Sarcastro

That is sort of the deal with DSL, you can often sacrifice speed for stability.

two things I would check for, 1) that you're not getting raped for uploads. Most DSL nodes will cut you off if you exceed a certain amount of upload traffic, it's an antiviral protection. 2) that you have the splitter installed properly and your modem is on a dedicated line.

Other than that, ya, DSL has trouble over distance. Cable does too, but it can go a lot further before it runs into trouble, and unlike DSL, there are a few things you can do to the line itself to jack up the signal a bit.

Mostly though, it's all about the lines, and what condition they're in. If youve got an old school coax run and the plastic is falling off the internal sheathing, its going to have issues. If you've got a cracked underground conduit for your telephone line, its going to have issues. Generally, but certainly not always, one is better than the other. Switching up to see is a valid strategy.

Also, since the two systems don't interfere with each other, theres nothing to say you can't run both for a while and see which one you like. Who knows, maybe the underground testing site near your place fires up the reactor at 8 and everything turns to shit.

GameHat

bowen wrote: »

Cable excels where DSL fails, and vice versa. Cable tends not to suffer from distance from the provider, but does suffer from node overload (multiple people being on at once watching porn) -- whereas DSL is the opposite, suffering from distance and not suffering from node overload. Other than that, though, really, high speed is high speed.

This, exactly. I've had both.

Captain Vash

one thing to consider though is that nowadays cable can offer much faster speeds than DSL, I know in my area dsl caps out at about 8mbps, whereas local Comcast offers 12 at their most basic rate and they have near future plans to pop that up to 20 with no rate increase.

EWom

I've had both cable and highspeed DSL (currently on cable). I primarily game online, (or did anyway) and for that I swear by cable. Even in the shittiest of shitty storms, my cable stayed up no problems, until the entire power got knocked out, but my friends on satelite and dsl got knocked out early.

HOWEVER, my friend, who is a web developer who works from home, and really doesn't game all that much, swears by DSL for what he does. He has about 8 computers hooked up to his DSL connection, and an xbox and a wii. And stands by DSL strongly. I don't know why, but that's just something to think about.

I only have two computers, and a Wii connected to my cable, never have any problems with it.

bowen

DSL was the thing for people that were around computers years ago. It was the high speed, pretty much a watered down version of a T1 but an upgraded ISDN, and was doing it before cable. So while cable may suffer from node overloads, you have a whole neighborhood utilizing that 10 Mb/sec system so even if it's 200% utilized, you're not going to see the decrease in speed that you'd see in as the perfect DSL/T1 bandwidth because it's on a few decade old technology, that's built even further on technology that may have been there a few decades before it.

Freakinchair

shutz wrote: »

Now, here comes the warning: as far as I know, Bell don't offer any unlimited plans anymore. They don't want to cut us off for fear of losing us, but I've been told that if I switch to another plan, I'll lose my unlimited transfers privilege. Which means, if you go for Videotron, and then try to switch back, your new plan will include a monthly cap.

This is indeed our situation, but at this point I don't really care about a cap. A cap is something I can deal with, random disconnects are not :x

All in all, thanks for the advice guys - I'm gonna go with cable after I work out the finances of the situation. We've been with Bell for the last 10 years and I'm just sick and tired of having to get our line fixed.

Now I'm worried about canceling the service though - I'm pretty sure theyre gonna do everything in their power to keep us as a customer which will make for a very annoying and awkward phone call.

vonPoonBurGer

Freakinchair wrote: »

Im in a bit of a bind here. I live in Quebec, Canada and am currently getting high speed DSL from Sympatico Bell. Our plan gives us unlimited download/upload amounts and 6gbs speed. Over the past (many, many) years weve had intermittent issues that build up over time. Every year or year and a half I need to call them because after 8:00 at night we'd be getting constant disconnects. After a couple of weeks of going back and forth they "fix" the problem.

Other than continuing to deal with Bell, you have two choices. You could switch from DSL to cable, or you can switch to DSL reseller. You might think a DSL reseller would be no different than dealing Bell, but my experience has been that a reseller can be light years better than Bell. I'm in Montreal, I was using Bell DSL, I had a lot of intermittent connectivity issues like you. Combined with Bell's introduction of bandwidth caps and insanely expensive overage charges ($1.25 per GB exceeding the cap), I went looking for alternatives. I found Videotron's prices, bandwidth caps and overage charges to be no different than Bell's. The plans the two companies offer are literally carbon copies of each other, and they're both terrible deals as far as I'm concerned. (ISP duopolies are bad, mkay?)

So instead what I did is sign up with a DSL reseller. I'm currently with TekSavvy, and the level of service has been fantastic. My DSL service is still running on Bell copper, but TekSavvy provides the support. I pay significantly less per month ($29.95; Bell used to charge me $42.95 for the same thing!), and as a heavy user TekSavvy's high monthly bandwidth limit (200GB/mo. combined up/down) and significantly cheaper overage charges (25 cents per GB) make it an even better deal. What makes it a huge win for me though is that TekSavvy's support is so much better than Bell's. I cannot stress what a difference it is. Everyone in the support department at TekSavvy knows their stuff. The last time I had connectivity issues, it was because Bell had screwed up the DSL profile for my connection. It took 5 minutes on the phone with a TekSavvy engineer to diagnose that as the problem, and I was promised that it would be resolved within 4 hours (because Bell is contractually obliged to make profile changes for resellers within that timeframe). It was actually fixed less than an hour later, and in total I had to spend no more than 10 minutes of my time on the problem.

This is the real secret behind Bell's extremely high level of FAIL as an ISP. In order for DSL to work, each DSL connection needs to be configured properly. Normally the configuration is set at install time based on the line tests the Bell engineer performs. As long as the configuration doesn't get monkeyed with, you've got no problems. Sometimes a switch gets flipped in your DSL connection's profile, for whatever reason, and the real failing of Bell comes to light: their support is terrible. Terrible. It takes far too long for them to diagnose profile issues. Over the two years I was with Bell, I had this problem come up a couple times, and every time it was a pain in the ass to get it fixed. They blame my computer, they blame my modem, they blame my router, they claim I don't have filters on all the jacks. Only after jumping through an assload of hoops (disconnect router, power cycle modem, connect computer directly to modem, blah blah blah) will they escalate it to a network engineer who knows something, and isn't just reading off a troubleshooting flowchart. And when I finally get through that guy who actually knows what he's doing, what does he say? "Oh it's a profile issue, here I'll change it" and bang, ten minutes later it's fixed. Too bad it took me two hours to get through to the guy!

I personally have not experienced Videotron's support, but I haven't exactly heard glowing reviews from people here in the office who have cable. With TekSavvy's fantastic service and low prices, though, I can't recommend them enough. I'm extremely happy I switched, I'd never go back to Bell at this point, and I couldn't imagine paying Videotron's prices.