This is for those of you with high speed modems.  For a while now Ive had
Road Runner, via Time Warner cable, and while its good when it works,
there have been occasional signal problems.  The cable folks say they
don't promise uninterrupted service and when its busy, at peak periods,
this can happen.  Also mail has once in a while been slow to arrive.  I
can send mail simulatenously to an alternate email address (like grex) and
to my road runner email and it will arrive at the alternate location first
often.

So anyway while I mostly like Road Runner, Ive had frustrations with it.
So today I get a call from Verizon notifying that my phone line is dsl
ready now (too Verizon longer than Time Warner to get up and running in my
neighborhood)  Im thinking of switching to DSL.  The price is about the
same and as the Verizon rep told me, the cable modem is like a shared or
party line, as my every so often signal problems indicate, whereas the dsl
will be over my phone line.  The deal is they send me the DSL modem and I
can try DSL for free for 30 days, during which time I can send it back and
cancel it at no charge if I dont like it.  

What Im wondering, is which do you guys prefer?  DSL or Road Runner?  Is
there really a difference?  
/

40 responses total.

Actually, if I could get both I would because DSL is not 100%
reliable either (SBC/Ameritech is gonna be the ultimate hardware
vendor no matter who's name is on the service).  The DSL is a 
'shared' line too, its just not shared locally and so you do 
tend to get a more constant (although likely lower) bandwidth
to the point of the first router.  After that DSL and cable
are probably similar as they are both equally bound by upstream
constraints.  As for DSL being more 'private', that will depend
on who is actually configuring the router.  So far of the few
times I have scanned my immediate 'neighborhood' - Class C - I
have had no problem seeing other hosts on the block, ie my
fellow DSL subscribers.  As I log all traffic I notice
a lot of scans and have noted number of them from all over
SBC/Ameritech so I suspect it is that way system wide.

It's not a technology issue.  It's a company issue.  Ask around and compare
customer service horror stories, basically.  :(

My SBC/Ameritech DSL has been very reliable.  It seems to be potluck; if you
happen to have good phone lines, DSL works great, if you don't it can be a
struggle to get them to fix things.

Currently Comcast's TV picture to me isn't even very good, so I just laugh
when they try to sell me Internet service or local phone service.

i did the verizon dsl plan once and got tied into a year contract while my
bandwidth decreased drastically. 

I had Ameritech DSL for a year, and it was reasonable.  There were occasional
service problems, and I wasn't overly happy with their tech support, but it
sure beat using a modem.  When I moved, DSL wasn't available in my new
location, so I went with what was then MediaOne's (now ComCast) cable modem.
I've been much happier with it.  The outages are fewer and shorter, and the
service is consistently faster.  ymmv.  

        The salesman's line that DSL isn't a shared medium is a bit deceptive,
for two reasons.

        The first is that, while cable modems operate on a shared medium, the
medium isn't shared like ethernet or most other broadcast media are;  under
the DOCSIS standard, which most providers are using, you time-share with other
modems, and your full time-share is generally around 1500 kilobits out of 20
or 30 megabits.  So yes, you're sharing, but you're sharing often twice as
much out of a much larger pool than the salesman's line would lead you to
believe.

        The second is that, with both media, you're only talking about the
first leg of the journey "up" to the internet, either to the DSLAM for DSL
or to the CMTS for a cable modem.  That's not where contention is going to
occur;  it's at all of the other legs of the journey, *all* of which are
shared by every user in your region, and many of which are a much more limited
resource than DSL or cable modem bandwidth.  So you're avoiding contention
at a place where avoiding contention really isn't important.  

        The only significant drawback to a cable modem being a shared medium
is when someone else's cable modem starts behaving abnormally, but in
practical terms, an outage is an outage, and you need to look at how many
outages a service provider has compared to another service provider.

I shied away from cable modems partly because I knew about all the
problems Michigan Tech had with them in the Daniel Heights apartments. 
One person with a bad splitter or a dirty connection or a poorly-made
cable connection to their stereo would bring everyone's modem on the
entire block to its knees.  This happened on almost a weekly basis.  I
gather the technology has improved since then, though I still get the
impression that Comcast customers are having to reset their modems on a
regular basis.  I almost never have to touch my DSL modem.

Comcast also seems to be much more vigilant about stopping people from
running servers on their system, and I like running a web server. ;)

        That's only a problem in an academic environment, really, since that
apartment provided it's own local cable delivery to all of the apartments.

We just changed from Comcast Cable to Earthlink DSL (Covad).

Initially getting the cable working was a snap.  We ordered a DSL a month
before moving into the new house.  Tested it a week before moving in, called
them, nothing happened.  After we moved in we started calling more
persitantly, got bounced from Earthlink to Ameritech to Covad and back again.
Lots of technicians visited.  A week later it was working.

Our DSL service hangs regularly.  Too much to be acceptable.  We've been
annoying Earthlink about this.  They want us to set up a single windows
machine with their software plugged into the net so they can figure things
out.  We normally use a Lynksys hub with miscellaneous Windows, Linux, and
Mac machines on the local network.  That's OK with them, but their tech
support doesn't cope amazingly well with it.  We're told that DSL reliability
issues can be worked out, if you keep harrassing the service provider about
it.

Comcast is a pack of idiots.  Besides the thing where they changed everyone's
email addresses on short notice, and put up really, really bad proxy servers,
they now seem to be instituting new usage fees.  This is an entertainment
company, not a utility provider.  Earthlink at least understands what their
customers expect from them, though they don't necessarily deliver.

So, as far as I can tell, both options suck.

The thing is, they still suck significantly less than regular dialin service.

(The FCC agrees with ComCast: Internet access is entertainment, not a
utility.)

Not for me.

Jan, you're a business user.  Therefore you need to pay exorbitant "business"
rates.  I dunno why, that's just what always seems to happen.

I think it's maybe more accurate to say that the FCC doesn't, at this stage,
understand the distinction well enough.

Why did you choose Earthlink rather than one of the smaller competitors?  I
had a terrible time even getting through to tech support at Earthlink and it
took them several months to determine that my e-mail was not working because
they had changed my address at some point and told me it had not changed.

I'm presently moving the bulk of my email from my current ISP to an
independant POP3 account set up by a cousin (sort of an extended family deal).
However, I'm still quite leery about moving to anything beyond the same
dial-up account I've had for the last 5+ years, after seeing the continuing
bad customer-service stories about DSL or cable service.

Re #15:  One possible reason is that the smaller competitors keep going under
         or getting bought out by bigger ones.

16, right. s'why i'm back to using slowass dialup. i use a small, well-run
isp based here, and technically for the price of dialup and 2 shell accounts
i could *supposedly* have dsl. based on experience, i'd rather stick to at
least something reliable with great support. plus they have picnics in
central park.

I tried DSL from a couple of small companies, and got tired of having to keep
getting new DSL lines installed when the old provider went out of business.
I'm now using PacBell (SBC), and it's working great.  SBC/PacBell tends to
be a lot better than SBC/Ameritech at just about everything, though, so my
recommendation of PacBell wouldn't necessarily be a recommendation of
Ameritech.

Re #14: Some people would argue the worst thing that could happen would
be for the FCC to start regulating Internet access.

We chose Earthlink because Valerie liked the help she got from them 
when she had dial-up service from them, once long ago.

Thats the COS ones aren't they?  (just think of the wonderful
activities your money is funding)

What is COS?

Sorry. "Church of Scientology"

I have Road Runner and even if DSL were available here, I doubt i'd switch
at this point.  Road Runner has been VERY reliable (only one outage for a
couple hours in the last 2 years that I've noticed), and I get good speeds.
Sure, that's not constant, but I'd rather my download rates range from 30k/s
to 200k/s than to be fixed at 40k/s.

I have a linksys firewall/router thingie to keep people out of my internal
network, so the insecurity of cable doesn't really apply.

Cable is no less secure than DSL.

As long as your computers are well secured yes.  However, you're more likely
to find people more easily on your local cable network because it functions
as a workgroup.  Windows computers often default to a workgroup name of
"WORKGROUP" so you can often find other people on your pipe quite easily.

'Cable is no less secure than DSL' is an interesting statement.
'Cable' depending on your vendor and arch 'shares' a media - the
cable'  - which inherently means that a properly configured interface
can 'snoop' on all peer traffic and there is no way to prevent that.
(And given the usual pricing model of 'cable TV' the more 'hosts'
on the 'network' the better until the customers squeal like a butt-
fucked pig.)  DSL on the other hand at least means a fixed max
transfer rate to the point of congestions and means that
while I might share an upstream choke point I cannot easily 
monitor the traffic of my peers downstream.

re: 28

You can't use a program set to snoop an entire DSL net? 

Not really, if you're an end user.  You'd need the packets going by to be able
to turn on your sniffer and watch them.  The issue Windows seeing the boxes
running NetBEUI seeing the other computers as being in the same workgroup is
a bit different -- my understanding is that most of the DSL access
concentrators are set up to prevent this, but I don't know the details.

I know very little about cable modem technology, but my understanding is that
with many modern setups, the cable modem should only be bridging traffic
intended for its own user onto the customer's ethernet, so sniffing cable is
presumably more difficult than sniffing, say, an office LAN.  I assume some
sort of cable modem-like device would still be able to act as a sniffer,
though, unless they're also doing some sort of encryption.

I don't think that's the way it works Steve.   My setup is a cable modem
linked to a LinkSys firewall/router thing which is connected to two computers.
By your scenario, if the two computers were off (assuming nobody was trying
to access my IP address directly), I would see little/no activity coming
through the cable modem to the firewall.

That is not the case.  The activity light on the cable modem side of the
firewall unit is going pretty constantly.  Presumably, with NetBEUI /
broadcast packets.

If it's just broadcast packets, that would prevent anybody with a sniffer from
getting useful information.  The real danger would be if it were behaving like
a non-switched ethernet, in which case each end user would be able to see
everything, not just the broadcasts.

I think some older cable modems did work like that.  I don't know much about
it, though.

That's basically how all cable modem networks operate. It's not really limited
to pre-DOCSIS nets. Most cable companies (AT&T Broadband, for instance) will
put ACL's in place to prevent that from happening.

With cable modems, the wire you get in your house is electrically shared
with your neighbors.  Everything you send or receive is visible to them
and visa-versa.  I believe all modern cable modems perform filtering,
and won't let you see your neighbor's traffic (at least, not without
alterations).  At some point "upstream" of you and your neighbors, there
will be some form of repeater or amplifier.  This has to be "2-way" in
order for cable modems to work, but I believe this actually has logic
that separates out the data stream, such that people on different
branches aren't competing for each other's traffic (and also won't see
each other's packets.)

With DSL, the wire pairs you get in your house go all the way back to
the nearest switch.  The wire to your house isn't shared with anyone
else.  From the switch on outwards, your data does share bandwidth with
other people's data, but it would not be possible for you to spy on
other people's traffic (or visa-versa).  You might be able to see
cross-talk on your line, with special equipment, but it's more likely to
be voice than data.

The physical infrastructure with both cable & DSL is not well protected.
Typically, both travel via the same poles, over a combination of land
that is either public, attached to a public right of way, or over
private land that is generally not well secured.  DSL lines, like most
phone lines, probably go through several wire junction boxes that are
weakly, if at all secured.  Cable may be slightly more secure, but only
because any botch in tapping the line is likely to result in
interference that will attract attention from many people, and result in
a visit by the local cable guy to fix the wire.  Neither is protected by
gas lined cable runs, guard dogs, video surveillance, or live human
guards.

Re #28: Even in theory, though, you could only snoop *inbound* cable modem
traffic, since outbound traffic uses a different set of frequencies which
your modem is presumably only designed to transmit on, not receive.

I'd be interested to see any information on someone actually successfully
snooping a modern cable modem network.  I know switched ethernet LANs can be
sniffed (though the methods to do it are pretty intrusive) but I've never
seen anything about techniques that would work with cable modems.

Well, we seem to have improved our DSL connectivity.  This weekend it
suddenly got a lot worse than it had been, so that instead of dropping out
a couple times a day, the DSL modem couldn't even connect most of the time,
and when it connected only lasted a few minutes.  Eventually I tried plugging
the DSL modem into the network interface box outside the house (picture man
sitting on lawn with modem and very long extension cord).  It connected on
every try.  So I decided there were problems with the wiring inside the house.
Not surprising - in most rooms we still have four-prong phone plugs.

Our DSL shares a line with our voice phones.  All the phones were plugged into
filters to prevent them from interfering with the DSL (or vice versa).  I
decided to rearrange things.  I split the phone line right were it came into
the house.  The DSL modem plugs into one branch.  The other branch goes
through one of the filters and then connects to the main terminal block for
all the old phone wiring in the house.  The idea being to isolate the DSL
from every other phone in the house.  Also I now need only the one filter
for all phones in the house instead of one on each phone.

We haven't had any connectivity problems since then.  It's only been two days,
so I'm still knocking on wood, but it looks good.

I was wondering... do you need to have telephone service to have DSL 
service?  Can I turn off my telephone service, rely on my cell phone 
for calls, but keep DSL?

There are companies that will do it, but the only one I'm currently aware of
focuses on business customers.  The company I work for has an SDSL line that
doesn't provide a dialtone at a remote site.  The contract we had to sign
made sure we were aware that the line didn't provide any sort of phone
service, "including emergency service."

Oh, well.  It seemed like a nice idea.

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss