Differences between Comcast cable modem and Bellsouth DSL?

My answer is completely non-technical: BellSouth, AT&T/SBC, and Verizon are being irresponsible netizens, and I can't in good conscious suggest any of them. BellSouth (along with AT&T/SBC and Verizon) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/06/AR2006020601624.html that Google (and others) are getting a "free ride" on the internet. See, the telcos own major backbones, connections that a huge majority of internet traffic travels through. Even sitting here on my Comcast connection, a http://www.exit109.com/~jeremy/news/providers/traceroute.html shows my traffic is going through AT&T (and Sprint) to get to Google. The telcos think they should be getting paid extra money by Google for this. This is the way the internet has always worked. The big companies with the major backbones have always worked in essentially the same way that international postal mail works. If you send a letter to France from the US, you don't have to put US and French stamps on it -- just US. This is because we agreed, a long time ago, that if France takes all the mail we have for them, we'll take all the mail they have for us, and call it even. The telcos are getting "paid" for this intermediate bandwidth by trade with their "peers," instead of cash. So now the telcos are saying it isn't good enough. So, they're threatening to degrade or drop connections to Google et. al. if they don't pay up. This attitude threatens the very foundation of the internet, and I find it completely irresponsible. So far, Comcast has kept out of this, so they're the ones I'm going to recommend. (Of course, if they jump on the bandwagon too, I'm left with no options for cable or telco, and I'll just have to suck it up.) As for Comcast's reliability, I've only ever had the service drop in the middle of the night, when I really should be sleeping anyway.

It really depends on your local neighborhood facilities. There is no reason to say that Comcasr is more reliable than BellSouth or vice-versa. You can compare Comcast annd Bell South features, but if you want to know what will work better in your house ask your neighbors; they'll have a much better idea than folks in the rest of the country. See what the Bellsouth cancellation policy is - if you can try it and quit after 2 weeks without paying any extra fees, I'd try that and not cancel Comcast until you are sure you want to switch.

I've had Comcast for the past 3 years and have nothing but good things to say about it. It's never gone down and it's fast.

itchie, I live downtown. Ziggy: i say your question is pointless Not if I'm looking for personal stories/experiences. The various info about Bellsouth matched or added to most local stories I've heard and confirms that little has changed since we left Bellsouth years ago. Better the devil we know and all that.

Brandon Blatcher, if you don't mind me asking, what part of Savannah do you live in (according to your profile)?

not to be rude, but this is an almost pointless question. as you can see, the answers to your question are all over the spectrum. with cable vs dsl inquiries, your mileage always varies. furthermore i'll give you an anecdote of mine--my parents have been at&t/comcast customers for about a decade now, and their internet connection generally stays up 24/7, with occasional outages during heavy storms. i moved out of their house to an apartment about seven miles away; still within the same zipcode and everything (northeast atlanta). i have comcast in my apartment as well, but my connection is either down or has shitty throughput (1kbps) on average 3 out of 7 days of the week. my connection drops when water falls from the sky. my connection drops when clouds pass in front of the sun. my connection drops when the sun, moon and stars shift out of alignment. i've called comcast to complain so many times that they no longer credit me for days where i don't have service. i say your question is pointless because as you can see from my experience, one person saying "comcast is great!" doesn't really mean anything if another person only seven miles away isn't able to check his email on a consistent basis. my cable tv service works great though; it stays up through the worst of storms :P

Just to clarify, we currently have a Comcast cable modem and are thinking of switching to Bellsouth DSL.

"They still want to screw you over and destroy the Internet, but at least they don't openly gloat about it." Given the lack of alternatives, I'm prepared to reluctantly accept that. Oh well.

One of several things I've never fully understood about Internet culture is the remarkable number of people who consider full broadband connectivity uptime critical for their job, hobby, or peace of mind, yet are content to make do with a single source pipe. It's a risky dependency, both cable and DSL fall prey to construction-related line cuts much too often, plus there are always random connection losses or temporarily DNS failures on the local network. Here, I have a Comcast cable modem that is hooked to a (open access) wireless and a third-party DSL that cables into the main network. Reliability for each? I'll give it to the DSL line overall, the Comcast cable seems to go down more often. We have never had both pipes down at the same time we needed to hit the net. And, as with many other people, connectivity here is critical -- so critical that back when, I priced out fractional T1 lines with service level agreements until I came to the realization that two slightly less-stable sources are better than one slightly more-stable source. And one helluva lot cheaper. I won't argue against single-source for starving students, the under[un]employed, and the net dilettante, but most "average" net-users can afford the dirt cheap insurance of going with a second source. Typically one can get both DSL and cable connectivity for under $100/month without extras. Assuming each has 95% uptime (which is a pretty fricking lousy percentage), barring Katrina-like disasters which simultaneously affect all connections, one would enjoy 99.75% uptime with both. Anyway, normally as sole-source choice I'd cast my vote for DSL. That is, providing your phone lines are pretty clean and the price differential isn't too serious for same approximate speed. But, if possible I'd recommend asking your neighbors about their experiences. Better reliability is usually worth a little extra money or a little slower speed, and connectivity faults can be a strictly local issue no one else on MetaFilter could council you on. That said, from what I've heard, BellSouth is a company which enjoys no better reputation than SBC, the phone company which owns the physical lines into all the residences around here. Be aware that ownership of those lines can be an important consideration, even were you to choose a third-party DSL provider which is not BellSouth. My horror story: two years ago SBC managed to hose my DSL for twelve days when they were "fixing" local telephone lines, denying their fault the entire time, ignoring an escalation of contacts up to and including a FedEx'ed letter to the SBC chairman in my capacity as an SBC shareholder, and standing on their claim that all contacts for repair must go through the DSL third party company. Finally on the twelfth day after a vendor meet on site, it was "oh yeah, we did that, we'll fix it tomorrow since it's almost 5PM today." Bastards. In my opinion, SBC deserves no one's DSL money. If BellSouth are even half as arrogant and incompetent as SBC, the Comcast cable modem solution is the only choice that makes sense.