"Cable vs. DSL, Explained" my ass... (Score 1)

The article referenced was really poor. Major problems with this article: - Writer uses personal experience with two providers to make generalizations about what to expect from the two technologies. His experiences with MediaOne Cable Modem (CM) and Bell Altantic DSL (ADSL, but the writer never tells you that) in no way reflects on what you will get with other Cable Modem or DSL providers. In fact, given Media One's greater experience with CM than virtually any other provider of that service, it's likely that you will not see as stable or high performance results from other CM providers such as RCN, Cablevision, etc. Likewise, given Bell Atlantic's inexperience with DSL and Internetworking, it's likely that they will give worse performance than other DSL providers. - Writer talks of bandwidth and latency results without discussing his testing methods. It's possible, and I suspect likely, that some of the writer's poor results may have been due to his own incompetence. It's misleading to bring up such points without providing proof that the tests where done fairly. For instance, results could easily be skewed for one service or the other by simply running the two tests at different times of the day. - Writer makes no indication of the differences between DSL offerings, a necessity for any article which claims to "Explain" Cable vs. DSL. Annoyances: - RISC vs. CISC as an example of where an inferior technology won over a supperior one is poor. Firstly, it's only true in the context of PCs. If you count total processor sales, RISC based chips have greater market share. Two, the CISC chips which currenlty have the larger market share of PC systems borrowed heavily from RISC technology. Lastly, the battle is hardly over, if we are all running PowerPC or Alpha bases systems on our desktops five years from now will the writer still claim CISC won the battle? At what point does the writer believe the battle ended? - Jim Collins