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I'm about to move to a new place, and we have DSL now. I'm trying to decide if that's what I want in the new place or if I want a cable modem or whatever else is available...I'm not real familiar. I don't think I could go from DSL to dial-up, but I think DSL is too expensive.

Are there better/cheaper options?

I'd rather die than go back to dial-up.

cable modem will probably be your only reasonable alternative. there are options like satellite but in my area, that's more expensive for less service.

Cable will slow down if many people get on it. DSL is a basically constant speed. I would kill for DSL. Am I the only person using dail-up nowadays? There is a small city here in georgia that offers free cable internet to cable TV subcribers.

Find out what is availible at your new place at DSL Reports . There are a few promotions right now for discounted rates for a few months.

I work for a cable company (and I used to work for one of our competitors before that), and I can tell you that there's no comparison between cable and DSL. DSL lovers like to mention how you get a guaranteed rate, but fail to mention how slow that rate is, and how you're actually paying more for it.

My current cable provider offers 128K upstream and 1800K downstream, for $40/month. And we monitor node activity, and break it up if we see too much utilization on a particular neighborhood, so you never experience a real slowdown when multiple people are online. Caching servers at the headend also help with this.

Bingo. I've had both DSL and cable, and there's no comparison. The slowest time I ever had on a cable modem was still close to twice as fast as my previous DSL connection. The whole bandwidth saturation argument about cable is WAY overplayed, especially if you are running with a good cable ISP. DSLreports.com is a good place to start.

It must be different here (winnipeg) then. I've tried both and chose DSL Cause here DSL is cheaper, and not much slower. I pay $35/mth including modem rental, and I got a free pcmcia Nic, and PCI Nic, I also consistently get 140 kb/s throttled downloads. Upload is a crappy 35 kb/s though. But cable modem costs you $45/mth and the fastest download I got was 180, and browsing sucked, tons of hangups. I guess what I'm saying is that every area is different, so ask around and find out what's best in your area.

Very true. Here in Wilmington, there's cable and DSL available. I have DSL, but most of my friends have cable. While their connection is faster than mine, mine is MUCH more reliable. Sometimes they will go down once a day for hours at the time, or more. I think I can count the times I've gone down on one hand, and then only for about a minute. Sometimes pure speed isn't the most important thing. But it helps!

dsl speed depends on how close you are to the provider. so if you are right next door, it will likely be much faster than cable, however... the further away you get, the slower the connection.