Cable vs. DSL - Industry Trend or Event

ENT, Oct 11, 2000 by Al Cinl

I love backyard barbecues, with friends gathered around the grill. And now and then I love a good fight, too, like the one that erupted recently at one of my barbecues.

Two buddies -- one from the local cable company and the other from the telephone company -- dropped by for an outdoor lunch. I can't remember exactly which one asked me whether I had a 24x7 connection to the Internet in my house yet, but I clearly recall what they said when I told them, "No, what would you recommend?"

The cable guy piped up first. He said "Get a cable modern, that's the only sensible option. For a flat $40 per month, we can give you terrific Internet performance."

As the cable guy bragged on and on about cable data service, I noticed the telephone guy's eyes narrow and mouth curl downward. When the cable guy finished his pitch, the telephone rep broke in with a few comments of his own. "Yeah, sure, I'd trust a cable TV company for reliable Internet access," he said, then went on to explain how the phone company could sell me a reliable and secure DSL service that would do pretty much the same thing.

They droned on and on, and when they left I realized I had to make a decision based on facts rather than rhetoric.

When a cable TV company offers household users access to the Internet, they do it by creating a virtual Ethernet LAN that loops through homes and connects back to an Internet router at the cable company. The homes that share this virtual LAN also share its bandwidth. A person's cable connection performance will vary based on the virtual Ethernet's simultaneous usage by others. By the same token, its theoretically possible that cable modem users on the same virtual LAN can scavenge other's Internet traffic, like a high-tech version of an old party line.

A DSL, by comparison, is a private physical circuit from the telephone company to a person's home. The user of such a circuit shares neither bandwidth nor traffic, which is the basis for the phone company's claims of better performance, reliability, and security. So, which is better?

After dispensing with the rhetoric, a few facts emerge.

Concerns about cable Internet access performance are grounded in fact, but in general cable performance can peak much higher than DSL and provide better sustained performance. Unlike DSL, cable Internet access performance isn't affected by distance from the provider company.

Likewise, there is truth in the argument that cable access is less secure. However, we should all remember that a permanent connection to the Internet, whether through DSL or cable, subjects a home PC to wily hackers anyway.

Unfortunately, for most of us, the argument is still moot. Less than half the homes in the US have access to either, and fewer than 25 percent have the luxury of a choice between them. For those of us lucky enough to have the choice, there is a bottom line: the two services are basically equivalent, with a roughly equal number of consumer complaints on both sides. Like my friends around the barbecue, get your cable and phone companies to beat each other up for you, then decide based on price. And, whichever service you pick, get yourself a personal firewall software package to go with it.

Al Cini is a senior consultant with Computer Methods Corp. (Marlton, N.J.) specializing in systems and network integration.