I live in Wichita, Kansas. The cable company here is Cox. What I think the biggest advantage dsl has is this: just the standard dsl is the 384/216 package. (I think; the upload used to be a 128 minimum, but it's been raised somewhere around 200). Cox offers absolutely NO GUARANTEED speed. Simply because you are put into a network with 50 other cable internet subscribers, and you share your bandwidth with them. If you are the only one online, you'll be super fast. If all or most of you are online at once, you will be crawling the web instead of surfing it. With dsl, my bandwidth is MINE, I don't share it with the neighbors. I have the basic, and my speed runs 1300/220 most times, and I never drop below 1200 kbps. My nephew with cable will run 2.5-3 Mbps between 3am and 4am, but there are periods where his speed is as slow as 200 to 300 kbps during peak usage times such as weekends, holidays, etc. Most of the time, he runs about 1.5 to 2 Mbps. But he pays about $15 or $20 more a month than I do. No thanks, Cox. I'll keep what I've got.
I will tell you from first hand knowledge with both formats. DSL works better more often than Cable.
I work on DSL DSLAMs for a living and have had Cable in my house twice.
Both times I had cable I was on a node that was very slow. When my speed would drop I could call my neighbor and ask if he was online watching baseball, and he was. As far as the back bone in our area, local pop. is around 15-20,ooo people, most don't get cable modem, the head end used t-1 backbone. 18 of them to be exact. I was told that it was the subdivision having a "leakage" problem and the Node was over used. Niether of which ever was fixed. In there defense, they did just upgrade to an OC-3, but only dropped a DS3 signal for bandwith(roughly 54MBps). I tried to get cable modem w/o tv and the price was way to high to consider.
Now the DSL, each of our CO based DSLAM's have a DS3 fiber feed to support them, and as our usage goes up we need only turn up the bandwidth, since it is ours. The remote DSLAM's are fed with T1/HDSL circuits, they use about a 30 to 1 compression ratio and work very well. When the limit is close we add another T1 to the shelf and clean up any "lag" problems. My own DSL is 1.5M/896k and I usually get about 1.3M/800k, with all three home computers running.
This is not to say that DSL never has any problems, we are also troubled with over usage, that stems from the fact that we just dropped our price for ISP to about $7, and DSL to $33 for up to a meg. You pay for a 640/640 line and we open the bandwidth to 1.5down/896 up. The day that structure hit, my job got very busy. BTW if you don't want to use a land line for phone(i.e. VoIP) you can get Stand alone DSL for roughly the same price.

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