cable vs adsl

odowdchr

matty2767 wrote: »

no the chap is on the 2mb plan.

maybe it is just the hit that vista + ie7 has over winxp + ie6. he probably has a higher spec machine for running that combination than i do for vista.

i am using a security program as well: f-secure. i will have a look at those optimzers though.

Why not compare traces to certain websites, then you'll be able to see the speed and path of your ADSL compared to his cable?

tracert https://www.bbc.co.uk (etc..)

matty2767

good thinking odowdchr. i did this just now and it took 14 hops to get to the bbc website. apart from the first one of 2ms (which must be my pc) they were all between 37 and 47ms.

richt71

cable is faster than adsl as it doesn't suffer from lapse in terms of distance from telephone exchange adsl does. The further away from your local telephone exchange you are with adsl the slower your connection will be. Of course both will be effected depending on how many are sharing your local hub.

bunking_off

richt71 wrote: »

cable is faster than adsl as it doesn't suffer from lapse in terms of distance from telephone exchange adsl does.

'fraid you're believing the Virgin hype. It can be faster, but;

- the access link you're using, which is of higher bandwidth, is shared between customers in the locality...effectively you're all on a big LAN so although the overall bandwidth is greater than a typical DSL installation, the "per customer" access bandwidth may not be - depends on the specifics of what your neighbours are doing at any given moment in time.

- as I said earlier, access bandwidth is but one piece in the jigsaw. There's also the caching technology used by the ISP, the bandwidth between their local access nodes and core nodes (in the case of DSL ISPs using BT the capacity into BT; in the case of LLU providers bandwidth from BT exchange sites to their network) and the bandwidth between the ISP's core nodes and their internet backbone provider. For example, the tracert figures given above are interesting to rule out ridiculous transmission paths to BT, but the reality is a lot of BBC stuff should be cached in the ISP (indeed their are technologies to actively push it there).

...the answer isn't black & white.

superscaper

bunking_off wrote: »

'fraid you're believing the Virgin hype. It can be faster, but;

- the access link you're using, which is of higher bandwidth, is shared between customers in the locality...effectively you're all on a big LAN so although the overall bandwidth is greater than a typical DSL installation, the "per customer" access bandwidth may not be - depends on the specifics of what your neighbours are doing at any given moment in time.

I don't understand, surely that's essentially what he said? And his statement about the exchange distance isn't just Virgin media hype is it? It's what we were taught at uni and that was long before virgin media existed.

bunking_off

The statement was "cable is faster". "Cable is faster" insofar that the speed of the access link is faster. What Virgin has extrapolated this to mean (and I'm assuming that richt71 has done similarly, given this thread is about how quickly websites load) is that this means your web will run more quickly. This is not necessarily correct.

As I said above, there are a lot of other things that determine how fast your internet access will be, which serve to illustrate that all ISPs are not the same.

However, the key thing that makes the "cable is faster" statement a classic case of comparing apples with pears is that the faster access link on cable is shared between the users in a given area, while the slower DSL link is dedicated to a given user (clearly, once you get beyond the access node/exchange, the backhaul is shared in both cases).

Put it this way. Let's take an extreme case (no suggestion that Virgin would ever do this, it's just an example to illustrate that "cable is faster" is a meaningless statement) : which is faster...a 100M cable system with 1000 users hanging off it, or a 512k DSL system dedicated to an individual user?

superscaper

bunking_off wrote: »

The statement was "cable is faster". "Cable is faster" insofar that the speed of the access link is faster. What Virgin has extrapolated this to mean (and I'm assuming that richt71 has done similarly, given this thread is about how quickly websites load) is that this means your web will run more quickly. This is not necessarily correct.

Which is why richt71 also gave that caveat at the end, which is what I was talking about and was essentially a condensed form of your post about the number of users/hub. You quoted only the first part of the post and disputed it out of context from the second part of the post.

jmc160

I've had both cable and ADSL, and I much prefer cable. Mainly because with cable, the speed you're sold is the speed you get (or at least it has been in my experience). It doesn't suffer from the same contention/distance issues that ADSL does.

Matty, Virgin does use proxy servers, but I will say that I have both XP and Vista machines on my network, and I do find that pages seem to load faster on the XP machine. Couldn't tell you why though.

Do you and your friend use the same browser?

Simon_B_2

jmc160 wrote: »

I've had both cable and ADSL, and I much prefer cable. Mainly because with cable, the speed you're sold is the speed you get (or at least it has been in my experience). It doesn't suffer from the same contention/distance issues that ADSL does.

Matty, Virgin does use proxy servers, but I will say that I have both XP and Vista machines on my network, and I do find that pages seem to load faster on the XP machine. Couldn't tell you why though.

Do you and your friend use the same browser?

I've just moved from ADSL to cable and have to say the inconsistency of the connection is much better :money:

matty2767

no he has ie6 and i am using the latest ie7 with all the phising stuff turned on. i suppose it is the price you pay for all the supposed increased security. maybe if i had a dual core it would be un-noticable