I wasn't sure where to post this, and I want the great advice of Afterdawn users to help me out with this.
So heres the deal, I want to save money. I currently have 15mb/s cable, but I can get a really great deal on 1mb/s DSL. I know what your thinking... Even if the cable is bogged down it will out-perform the DSL hands down. Yes I know this. But a key point for me is that my computer is very old and slow, so I'm not able to harness the speeds of the cable.
I'm running on a Netvista 2257-72u thats got a PIII 935mhz with 256mb PC133 Ram. Needless to say this isn't very fast.
So what I'm askingis, will my computer see a major difference in speed for browsing and gaming(I only play a single low req 2d space game www.cosmicrift.com).
Is my computer able to use the cable for what its worth? Or am I almost just as well off with the 1mb/s DSL? I can get good speeds when using Bandwidth testers, but in real world downloading and surfing, its nothing impressive. I can use torrents and get about 200-300kb/s and I get about 110-130ms ping in my game. Will I see a big change if I switched from 15mb/s cable to 1mb/s DSL?
Also take into consideration I live in an area with lots of apartment buildings, and my current ISP is 1 of the 2 major ones here, so almost everyone is using this cable so its obviously going to get dogged down by this alone.
Any and all help in determining how much change I will see is greatly appreciated, I wouldn't switch but the cable is bundled with phone for $76/month and the DSL with phone would be $40. I could really use the extra $36/month if theres no big change in speed.
Thanks in advance for all help and info.
Cable ISP is Eastlink (www.eastlink.ca)
DSL ISP is Primus (www.primus.ca)
If you do a lot of major downloading than you'll notice a difference. From my DSL I would max out at 150kb per second, on cable I get about 750kb per second.
Also when I had DSL, there where days when my connection would not work or would work very slow, this happened several times per month. With the cable connection I have currently it's been rock solid.
DSL is better than dialup, but it's not what I would call high speed. But if you don't do any major downloading it is a better value in the long run.
Turns out Primus doesn't like Atlantic Canada and doesn't offer it, the only other company that offers DSL offers 3mb/s for only like $5-$10 cheaper than my 15mb/s cable and they have 5mb/s for the same as my cable... So I guess I'm sticking with my Cable...
