The DSL and Cable Internet providers have been battling for the premium user market for a year now in the Bay Area. DSL has actually gotten good market penetration because PacBell made it cheap and put resources into making it work (though not enough resources so there are problems). TCI Cable (bought out by AT&T), which owned many of the area's cable providers, lagged in its Internet offerings.

Perhaps you've seen the PacBell DSL ads poking fun at cable access. A once harmonious neighborhood is divided into armed camps as the cable pipe is shared and used by everyone. This ignores the fact that the cable pipe is huge in the first place, can be made faster by dedicating more channels to it (at the cost of sacrificing video channels), and can be made less shared by installing "hubs" closer to the user's homes (so your local segment is only composed of your neighborhood rather than a one mile area.

Likewise I just heard this ad on the radio from the cable side. Actually I've seen them on tv too. A guy calls in a pizza place that guarantees 30 minute delivery (which Dominoes stopped doing years ago by the way, once they became dominant in the pizza delivery market). The pizza guy says that delivery is only guaranteed within a mile of the pizza place and if you live near the end of that mile the delivery guarantee is 60 minutes. The customer complains about how the service is advertised and there are some more comical comparisons until the "voice from above" states that you don't want this in your pizza delivery, why settle for it with DSL?

The main jabs at DSL in the commercial are that you have to be close to the telco office (and although the commercial uses 1 mile in its pizza example, it never mentions the actual DSL range of 3 miles) and that bandwidth speed varies if you're too far away (which is true). So only "a fortunate few" have full DSL access, or any access at all. The funny part is right at the end of the radio commercial (the tv commercial probably has small text legal disclaimer at the end, but radio you have to use an announcer with a fast yet understandable speech which is a lot easier to pick out than on tv) where the announcer mentions that cable Internet access is "not available everywhere, upload speeds vary, download speeds limited to 128 kb/s". Doh! Pratically the same disadvantages that they say DSL has.

I don't know how pervasive cable tv is, but at a range of 3 miles, DSL is designed to cover 65% of the US households, over 90% of households in major metropolitan areas. PacBell also has 384 kb/s download and 128 kb/s upload speed at its lowest tier (faster if you're within 2 miles of the telco office and you're willing to pay more).

Personally I think I made the right choice (not that there was one way back then as cable Internet access is rather recent in my area). For running a server DSL is the better choice in my area. You have a static IP address (or 5 addresses, better speed, and the license allows you to run a server, with the small business account at $100 a month total). Although there are some service interruptions, they don't seem to last more than 30 minutes, they're occassional, and I'm not sure if they're PacBell's fault. After an initial installation trouble everything else has been working smoothly. PacBell doesn't artificially limit the bandwidth, if there is excess bandwidth you can use more than your rated capacity.

Although the cable tv service is much better now that AT&T refreshed the channel lineup a month ago (probably upgraded the equipment or something), there are still periods of no service, bad service, and occassional glitches. These are not the same kind of people that I want to get Internet access from. Cable companies are not known for their high quality of service, whereas phone lines always work (so much so that it's a real surprise when they don't work even after a disaster). All these things add up to a service choice that, although costing more, is more appropriate for me and my needs.