Networking, Router & cable company

Hi All,

I would like to get some feedback from you reguarding my sitituation. I moved to a little city outside of Sacramento last week. We moved from Las Vegas where I had finally got my home network just the way I wanted it. Cable modem for internet, Linksys BEFW11S4 wireless 4 port router with switch. My wife's computer connected to the network by ethernet and my lap connecetd by the wireless PCMCIA card.

Anyway after we moved I ordered a cable modem and after they install it I find out that they do NOT allow ANY ROUTERS on their system. Sure enough when I plugged in my router it did not work at all. Well after reading and researching many web pages I found out that I could clone the MAC address and the router would now work without any problems. The only problem is now I REALLY DISLIKE teh local cable co (Did I tell you that they said I could use a plain old hub to share my connection but that they also would charge me an additional $18.95 a month for each additional computer, how crazy is that).

DSL is comimg to my area in a few months and I am considering switching only because I don't want to give this cable company any more business than I have to.

Now for my main question.
Is there any advantage of DSL over cable at all. Cable is running me $34.95 while DSL would cost me $49.95 a month.

Thanks for your input and have YOU ever heard of any cable companies not allowing routers at all?

Thanks again,
John Smitch

DSL is better.... when you get a cable modem you share the same broadband with X amount of people while with DSL you get our own line, plus DSL is said to be more reliable

i had a cable modem a while back and the performance differed from day to day; which shouldnt be the case with dsl

[Omega]

Well, nothing is going to be universally true, but here are my opinions.

Cable is generally much better for the equivilant price. In my city, cable is available for $41.95 per month, with 2 megabit downstream, and 384 kilobit upstream. For about the same price, 640 kilobit downstream with 256 kilobit upstream is available for DSL (this isn't necessarily the exact figures, but that's generally correct). Granted, with cable it's possible to experience speed degredation if several people in your same zone (I'm not sure how they define zones, but probably a group of 4-8 city blocks) are high-bandwidth users. This occurs because a specific amount of bandiwdth is available per each zone (with cable), and they don't increase the bandwidth available when there's more people using it. With DSL you have (relatively) dedicated bandwidth. You're still sharing the backbone bandwidth with other users in your city, but that's not going to fluctuate as much.

If you have enough money to buy like, 1.5 megabit synchonous DSL, go for it, but then again, 2 megabit downstream cable is going to cost a lot less.



I have heard of cable companies not supporting routers, and I've heard rumor of some prohibiting them, but I don't see how they're supposed to do this, when you can spoof the WAN MAC address on nearly all routers (just make that the same as your NIC MAC address, probably).