THSCC Forums

I've had DSL for about six years now... mostly I've been very pleased with its reliability and speed.

Lately though, I've been kinda pissed about it... where I'm at, in relation to the substation, or whatever it's called, I can only get up to 4 meg speed (even though I've been paying for 10 meg speed). Not only that, most speed tests I've done show I get only about half that.

To top things off, I'm going through an issue for the second time this year where every 15-20 minutes, I'll lose my connection (from DSL to Modem) lasting anywhere from a few seconds, to over 2 minutes. Obviously, this renders iRacing impossible, and makes every thing else extremely annoying! I "participated" in a webinar Tuesday night, and in the hour and a half I was on it, I lost my connection SIX times. Unacceptable.

My only cable option here in New Bern is SuddenLink. They are telling me I can get a 10 meg setup for $30 a month. $50 modem, $10 installation.

I've got too questions:

Are there differences in cable modems I should be aware of?

Anyone with Suddenlink experience? (Please note... I am NOT planning on using their cable TV service... but I am also considering a switch to VOIP with them.) Thoughts?

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Stacy King
Midlife Crisis Participant

I have been with Suddenlink for ~10 years (Cable + Internet + VOIP in the last couple of years)

-Modems? I haven't noticed anything special about them
-VOIP? Mediocre at best. It NEVER goes out but half the time when you make a phone call there is a 1 second delay and you hear your voice "echo" over the line. Makes conversation rather annoying. Sound quality is hit or miss, honestly we are about to drop ours as soon as I can find the power cord to the old modem.
-Internet? No complaints here, I have 10Mbs service but I don't know what speed I am actually getting, I'll check tonight. Rarely cuts out.

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02 Focus SVT
STF 9

Thanks Ryan!

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Stacy King
Midlife Crisis Participant

in my ten years as an IT consultant i've noticed that in almost all cases cable > dsl. throughput, latency, jitter, stability, and ease of setup are all generally better on cable than dsl. that's no guarantee that it will be the same in your case but the odds are on your side.

Thanks Jason... that eases my mind a bit about the switch.

Oh... and Ryan... Off topic but, that tickles

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Stacy King
Midlife Crisis Participant

We recently switched from DSL to Cable. We switched because I was getting <1M download, plus the modem would not stay up. I could not get Mindspring to help so we switched to cable. The cable modem is much faster, doesn't go down beats dsl completely. In the scope of network services, the order is probably FIOS, Uverse, Cable, DSL, Dial up. You probably want at least Cable if you do VOIP phones but they will always be worse quality than traditional voice w/o the availablity of QOS and from what Ryan says it sounds like your service is not good for VOIP yet

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1990 Faded Reddish CSP Lite Miata
2002 Electron Blue Corvette Z06
2005 Mazda 6 Wagon
2003 Nissan Pathfinder DTV (Dog Transport Vehicle)

Same here ... switched a few weeks ago from Vonage voice and Frontier DSL to the Time Warner triple play. Voice and Internet are better than before. DSL was very stable, just a bit too slow for streaming.

Frank