When I lived in San Diego, I had cable modem through the @home network.
1998 I moved to Santa Cruz county where it was not available. This summer I got Pacbell ADSL.

Here my experiences:

In 15 months of using cable modem, I had not one outage. Not one minute.
I must add that I am a heavy user.. for a while I ran an Apache web server from my machine at home. Because of the assymetric bandwidth, I still do not recommend that.

Now I have ADSL.
Installation was easy, pretty much identical to installing a cable modem.
Both connect over an ethernet card.
In 3 months I found many outages. I did not count them. I once bothered to call Pacbell and found that I just wasted my time.


What was better with cable modem?

* reliability - at least Cox Cable / @home in San Diego. No outages ever experienced.

* the upstream bandwidth. It's less than the downstream's, but not as bad as ADSL. To be fair, ADSL still has a great upstream compared to conventional modems. I upload a lot, so this does matter to me.

* customer service

* the price - I paid $49 total since I did not own a TV.
With ADSL the total price is around $60 / month. Also the setup fee
was $99 for cable, but $199 for ADSL.


What is better with ADSL?

* downstream bandwidth somewhat better.
Cable maxxed out at 100 KByte/s. With ADSL I have reached 140 KB/s.
These values are rather theoretical since you will hardly find a server that is fast enough to make use of that rate. E.g. if you download from popular ftp servers, both technologies will give you about 70 KB/s.


Why do I use ADSL? Because cable is not available here.. and of course it is much better than ISDN or even a regular dial-up account.





Recommended: Yes