[Tfug] why not cable?

Tue Sep 12 17:41:53 MST 2006

My 2 cents on dsl vs cable for home use.

I currently have a mixture of Qwest DSL and Cox cable service across
three Tucson
locations and Comcast cable service for my parents on the East coast.
It's hard to
compare costs exactly since you almost always end up getting discounts
for bundling
other services.

In central Tucson:

    Location 1  has 7Mbps DSL service for $31.99/month. The basic phone service
    is $22 for a total of $57/month with taxes. If you have a
telephone bundle you can get
    a discount on the DSL of $5. You can also get a more basic phone
service that's
    about $5 cheaper.  The 7 Mbps service is the same price as Qwest 5 Mbps -
    they just let you have faster service if conditions permit. Cable
is available here
    if I wanted it. DSL upload speed is something like 768 Kbps, but I
often get as
    much as 1024 Kbps - right now I'm showing 960 Kbps from Vail.

    Location 2 has 6 Mbps Cox cable service soon to be 7Mbps for $5 more. DSL
    is not available in this neighborhood. Costs me about $52/month. It was
    $51 for just Internet, but with discounts I can get the most basic
cable tv for
     $1 more, so I got that for kicks even though I really only watch
dtv over the air.
    ( Just called Cox and they say that 7 Mbps service will have 712 Kbps upload
      instead of the current 512 Kbps. 712 seems a strange number. I'm guessing
      he meant 768)

In Vail, AZ

     Have 1.5 Mbps DSL for for $24/month with a home phone package discount and
     a phone service of $36/month for a total of about $60/month. No Cable is
     available. No faster DSL is available.

Both DSL and Cable modems were about the same and are often heavily rebated
when establishing service. For DSL I have the Qwest Actiontec modem and the
Qwest flavor 2wire, which was more expensive ($100 or so from Qwest). The 2wire
is the more reliable and has potential to support secure remote
administration via
https but this feature is only available from Qwest with their
netbacker monthly service
for around $10/month - very aggravating since it's only a 1 time
download, but the service
has a steep cancellation fee. So I purchased a Sangoma DSL modem pci card with
hopes of building an Ipcop DSL router to replace  the 2wire.

The biggest impact of Cox port blocking so far has been having to use their
SMTP server - always seems I have to change my laptop every time I send email.
But I'm irked by the concept.

The bigger pain is the lower upload speeds which impacts remote access via VNC
or Remote Desktop - these are much better when connecting to a DSL site. Comcast
(out of town) has even slower upload speeds than Cox. Transferring
large files like
my folk's latest photos from their cable site is like reverting to dialup.

Technical support has been much better for Qwest DSL for me. With Cox
they messed
up my account pin on a Friday and I couldn't get it reset until the
next week which
prevented getting technical support.
  I have had some outages on the Vail DSL, all quickly resolved once I
called. The
Qwest Actiontec modem/router needs to be power cycled too often, so I'm moving
away from those. The Motorola cable modem has been fine so far.

Qwest does have local dialup numbers which you can request for use when on the
road. Don't know about Cox. Usually though I just setup dialup on my phone line
for emergencies.

Qwest currently has a $22 for life special for 1.5 Mbps dsl, but it's
$5 more if you
don't have a phone bundle discount and I think it requires a
multi-year contract.

So far I like dsl better than cox cable. It's feels less expensive
since I want the land line phone service and don't want cable TV. Port
blocking is lame; I'm buying bits on the
wire.

And who knows what Cox is handing over to the Feds ;-)

Peter Collins
Ok, 4 cents

On 9/12/06, keith smith <klsmith2020 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> How can you tell what ports are blocked?  Also I recently was looking at one of the SMTP servers and the config file showed an alternate port of 467 or something like that.  So if port 25 is blocked can't I just set my pop client to use that port instead of port 25?
>
> Wouldn't 53 be blocked also?  With alternate ports such as 8080 instead of 80 with port 53 open I can still run a named server....ETC.
>
> Also I thought all DSL providers block some ports.  I used to do tech support for a DSL hardware vendor.  As I recall port 25 was blocked but could be unblocked upon request. Not sure about other ports.
>
> I use Cox and they block port 25 so I had to use their SMTP server back when I used to POP.  I use webmail now.
>
> When I was on DSL with UltraSW they did not block ports and later when I moved to DakotaCom.Net, I think they did not block ports either.
>
>
> I also wonder why DSL is only $21.95/mo, while cable is $40/mo.
>
>
>
>
> - - - - - - -
> Keith Smith
> - - - - - - -
> http://travelingcheese.com/search_engine/increase-search-engine-traffic.html
> - - - - - - -
>
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