My father switched to cable because he was annoyed at the massive downtimes that our DSL provider had. I was getting annoyed too, because I'd be working on something critical and all of a sudden Firefox would just tell me the connection was refused. XP

Here in Iowa, cable is much, much better than DSL. Too many people here have DSL.

LOL, it all depends on the subscription. Here in Holland (europe), we've got cable and Adsl at very different speeds, cable speed depends on the number of people in you neighbourhood having cable, ADSL, is independant of the number of users. At the moment, ADSL is more popular here than cable, because it's cheaper (about $ 15) AND the higher speeds for lower prices . I've got ADSL for about 10 months and i haven't had 1 downtime at all.

damn, i am so hard gonna cross the border. it's insane how much cheaper, faster and less limited internet is in holland compared to belgium

In France, a cable operator decided to make 20 MB.
But does not know the limits of the offer and it's reserved to PARIS.
Actually, most adsl operator prepare ADSL2+.
The internet furtur will be very fast :-).

it depends on the provider..

in Belgium
cable: 6.6 mbps
ADSL: 3.3 mbps (can go to 8.0mbps with additional costs)

+ they're thinking of upgrading to Vdsl so ...yeay
also the IDTV's are comming in the summer of 2005 (interactive tv)
and since ADSL (in Belgium) is owned by the governement (Belgacom) i suggest stick to adsl so you will be able to get lots of benefits and additional channels once IDTV is out

The cable is faster (usual) and is also better in my opinion. Its not that expensive and has very good options!
The adsl costs more and has the same features or even less than the cable network! It also slower than cable...like in belgium you have to pay more for faster internet.

I've been using DSL for the last 5 years or so. From what I've found, in my area DSL provides superior speeds and general connections. At my old house, I used to get top notch speeds (well, for me at least) of around 152K/sec downstream and 43k/sec upstream. Not too shabby. However, in my new apartment they capped the bandwidth to a piddly 12K/sec downstream/upstream combined. Horrible!

Of course, my neighbor has a wireless network without encryption, so...

And work always provides the T1.

Wow, who is your cable provider??
Here in NC(in the triad), cable is $40 a month and you get about 500k down and 40kup.
That is through time warner, and without any uncapping or anything like that. You can get even faster DSL if you are willing to may a lot more money($80 a month) from speakeasy or Bellsouth.

If you are getting crappy speeds at an apartment, it may be because the apartment complex leases a business class line and then splits the feeds to all the different apartments. This was what happened to some friends of mine. The cable company can install a separate line for $40 a month, if where you live is anything like here, or you can check with the local phone company about getting a DSL line. 12k up and down is terrible. I would go out of my mind.

I don't really know how good DSL is in other countries, but here in Belgium they definately suck. I have a cable connection and never had problems whit it.

Some people say DSL is faster because they increase the bandwith when more users go online, but up to me this is just one big lie. I mean cable users in belgium get a maximum downloadspeed of 4M/s, ok we never reach the 4Mbps but it isn't exeptional for us to get downloadspeeds of 700kbps downloading from sites. DSL users get 3.3 Mbps max, but they don't even get downloadspeeds of 500 in most cases.

A friend of mine has DSL and last time I went to him his downloadspeed from a good website was even lower than a smallband connection.

Yeah, I think it all depends, but right now it looks like Cable is the best bet for most people. At least until widespread fiber optic wiring becomes widespread outside of asia.