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Broadband War of Words: Meet the Slowskies

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Written by Peter Carmel

Monday, 08 May 2006

Have you seen the cute Comcast TV ads lately with the turtles named the Slowkies. It typifies the smoke and deception that Comcast and the cable industry have used over the years. As usual, there is some truth to what they have to say, but there is also some fiction as well. Let’s take a look and try to sort facts from fantasy, and price from value. That is what a consumer needs to make an informed choice of broadband providers.

Comcast would like you to think that because their service has four times the download bandwidth as the typical DSL connection, you will always get four times the speed when surfing the Internet. This is patently a false assumption.

ISPs like to talk about speed or bandwidth. But what exactly is bandwith? It’s not really speed at all. The information on the Internet is electrical, so it moves at the speed of light.

Bandwidth really means maximum data speed potential. One might take the analogy of the Internet and a highway. If “dialup” is like a single lane city street, you might think typical “DSL” as your typical 4 lane freeway, then “cable” is like the Indie 500. Problem is that your car is only 12 feet long and only needs one lane.

Similarly, your internet transmissions can only proceed at the rate the information is sent from the website server. It makes no difference that your cable connection is 1600kbps if the server and upstream infrastructure can only send at 10 kbps. So the huge racetrack goes mostly unused. You don’t need a huge racetrack for your family car.

Of course there is more to look at when surfing the Internet than just bandwidth.

Another issue is what I like to call “response”. How fast does the system respond when you click on something? The technical term is latency. Latency is measured in fractions of a second. This is important because the each time you click on something, the server where the information is kept needs to communicate many times with your computer as it sends the information. The server needs to know how fast to send information. Your computer needs to tell the server computer after each bit is received so that the server knows that your computer is ready for more.

Our analogy of the racetrack could be applied as follows: Latency would be similar to reflexes of the driver. If the driver has slow reflexes, he must slow down because he can’t react to changes in the highway. As you may have surmised, generally, cable broadband has a much higher latency than DSL.

For this reason, online gamers prefer DSL over cable because their scores depend heavily on their ability to send and receive information without hesitation. When playing an action online game, a difference of a quarter of a second, repeated thousands of times while gaming, translates into a distinct disadvantage if not certain defeat.

With all of the above in mind, it should be easier to access your individual needs and objectively compare each service. Complicating the issues is the fact that Comcast chooses to bundle its broadband service with their cable TV service. If you subscribe to cable TV, Comcast charges about $45 a month for Internet broadband service. If you don’t use their cable TV, Comcast bumps that price up to about $60 a month. So the actual value depends on your particular situation.

DSL service ranges wildly among the various ISPs. Depending on the features and ISP, prices range from about $20 a month to over $100. SBC/PacBell (recently purchased by AT&T) is currently offering DSL less that $13 a month when you commit for a year.

Conclusion: For most residential consumers, even the slowest DSL has plenty of bandwidth. Even those who are networking a few computers will be happy with DSL of any kind. As I said before, gamers prefer the low latency times that DSL provides. Those who consistently download large files such as music or movies or have dozens of computer networks may find cable broadband to be a better idea and value.

Discuss (1)

by Peter
Jul 21 2007 00:53:10

This thread discusses the Content article: Broadband War of Words: Meet the Slowskies As you can see, I think cable speed is not needed for most people. It's kind of a waste of money!

Discuss this article on the forums. (1 posts)

Last Updated ( Friday, 20 July 2007 )

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