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1.  

   Speakeasy

   

   wonko, Jul 20th, 2005 @ 11:22am

   
   

   Woah now. DSL is beating cable on speed and price? I don't think so. I have yet to see a DSL provider who can give me 8Mb/768Kb for $55 a month, but Comcast can (and installation is less of a headache to boot).

   The BroadbandReports.com ISP directory seems to agree with me for the most part.

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2.  

   It's still true..

   

   Spam, Jul 20th, 2005 @ 11:23am

   
   

   My Comcast cable modem gets 4mbit down consistantly. I have only had 1 outage. On the other hand, my boss has a Comcast cable modem (4mbit too) and he got a Speakeasy DSL line as a test. They advertise 6mbit down/768 up. He said that he has barely been able to break 1.5mbit with the line. Pretty much the same deal with other DSL users I know. Most of them stick to DSL because they have static IP addresses and run small web servers at home.
   Oh, and I'm not in the boonies, either. I'm in the Silicon Valley, only a mile from a sizable NASA installation.
   
   My cable modem is $45/mo, and the speeds are great. I don't use any of the other advertised Comcast services.

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3.  

   RE: Cable Companies Stick By The "Speed Matters" M

   

   Tawgley, Jul 20th, 2005 @ 11:25am

   
   

   While I agree with the points in the subject piece, I wonder if there isn't also a missing piece. If most are like me, I'll do ANYTHING that is price competitive (ie LOWER to make up for the hassle of the switch) just to get away from the absolutely abysmal service of the Broadband Cable industry .. sure speed matters but you seldom if ever get the speed promised, there are have DAILY service interruptions and it ain't getting any better as cable consolidation continues aided and abetted by the very 'watchdogs' who are supposed to assure competition.

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4.  

   Re: Speakeasy

   

   Mike (profile), Jul 20th, 2005 @ 11:28am

   
   

   I didn't say DSL was beating cable on speeds, but that they were "catching up," which is accurate. And, as the telcos move to fiber (either to the premise, curb or node), they'll start to pass what cable can offer.

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5.  

   Re: Speakeasy

   

   Michael Pate, Jul 20th, 2005 @ 12:06pm

   
   

   I have had DSL for almost four years and I get 3Mb/1MB cheaper than the original 512Kb/256Kb. I checked the Comcast website and they still do not offer anything where I live.
   
   That sort of makes the choice easy.

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6.  

   Dilbert

   

   TrueJim, Jul 20th, 2005 @ 12:44pm

   
   

   Wasn't it in his book The Dilbert Principle (copyright 1996) that Scott Adams pretty much summed up this competition this way: "Cable companies are populated by the guys who can't get jobs at the phone company." He predicted that this is how things would turn out, nine years ago -- not bad!

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7.  

   Re: Speakeasy

   

   Anonymous Coward, Jul 20th, 2005 @ 1:33pm

   
   

   I will gladly move away from Cox cable the moment SBC demonstrates reliable and clue-full (as opposed to clue-less) fiber. Till then, it's not worth it.

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8.  

   Price vs Speed

   

   gregr, Jul 20th, 2005 @ 1:57pm

   
   

   I personally look at speed before price. I had DSL for a bit (and cable at the same time - had some problems with RR and was thinking of moving to DSL). The DSL was MUCH slower than the cable, even though 1/2 the price. I gladly pay for the higher priced, higher speed cable. There's a couple of stories out today about getting 100 megabits out of cable. I'd pay a lot more than I'm paying now for that. I mean, I can rip 40 stations at once and get 2k songs a day, with my current cable mode... with that kind of speed I could do download 10k a day!!! :P

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9.  

   Re: Speakeasy

   

   Ivan Sick, Jul 21st, 2005 @ 5:50am

   
   

   Cavalier offers DSL 10Mbps up, I forget the down speed. The rep I talked to said it was more like 8Mbps off-peak. Might not be a real world number, but I agree with Tawgley.
   I didn't get Cavalier because they couldn't do it in my area, but there's the provider you "have yet to see." And it's $25/month if you have their phone service.

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10.  

    Re: Dilbert

    

    W Klink (profile), Jul 21st, 2005 @ 7:47am

    
    

    Well, actually it was "The Dilbert Future" (1998). And in it, he predicted that the cable companies would deliver cable broadband as poorly as the Bells delivered ISDN and that, in the meantime, the Bells would make ISDN easier to install and configure and we'd all be using ISDN while the cable companies tried to catch up.
    So not exactly a perfect prediction.

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11.  

    Re: Speakeasy

    

    Eric, Aug 9th, 2005 @ 3:04pm

    
    

    "8Mb/768Kb for $55 a month" ?
    
    CavTel [Cavalier Telephone] gives me 10Mb/1Mb for (included in my entire plan w/ phone service) $49.95/mo

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12.  

    Re: Speakeasy

    

    Kristie Cassady, Feb 21st, 2006 @ 8:14am

    
    

    I agree Cavalier DSL is fast and affordable, but several times a day it just becomes unavailable to me, and always at the worst times. It may be our old phone lines that are affected by the weather (sometimes I get static on the phone line when it's rainy.) Do you ever have this problem? I'd keep Cavalier DSL forever if the service was more reliable.

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