- Cable broadband is faster
- Cable broadband is the best performing
- Cable broadband is the most awarded
- Virgin broadband is the most popular choice
Cable broadband is faster
DCable is designed for the digital age. It carries information as light which is very efficient and means loads of stuff can travel vast distances down it and arrive in good shape.
Top speed cable broadband (up to 20Mb) is over 350 times faster than dial-up (up to 56K) and nearly 3 times faster than the top speed ADSL broadband currently sold by the likes of BT, Talk Talk and Tiscali (up to 8Mb).
Up to 20Mb broadband from Virgin Media is the fastest broadband that's widely available.
The faster broadband gets, the more you can do with it. Which is why cable speeds of up to 50Mb are being tested right now. That's nearly 900 times faster than dial-up.
Unlike cable, ADSL comes down phone lines. It uses copper wire 'technology' that was designed for making phone calls which means broadband speeds get slower the further you live from the telephone exchange.
See it for yourself
Have a look at the demos and you'll see just how fast cable is.
Why does ADSL slow down the further you are from the telephone exchange?
Imagine you're having a conversation with someone who's walking away from you down a busy street.After a while you'd struggle to hear them, right? Same with ADSL broadband:
All sorts of things get in the way of the signal as it travels down the wire (like stray electricity from other wires). Bit by bit, less and less makes it through until, eventually, if the wire was long enough, you'd be left with nothing at all. All the stuff that chips away at your signal is called 'noise'
Why doesn't cable broadband slow down over distance
Imagine you're having a conversation with someone who's walking away from you down a busy street. After a while you'd struggle to hear them, right? Same with ADSL broadband:
All sorts of things get in the way of the signal as it travels down the wire (like stray electricity from other wires). Bit by bit, less and less makes it through until, eventually, if the wire was long enough, you'd be left with nothing at all. All the stuff that chips away at your signal is called 'noise'.
Something called contention also affects the speed. What is contention?
The best way to explain contention is to imagine your connection to the internet is a motorway. Sometimes it's quiet and you can zip along. Sometimes it's packed with other cars and everything grinds to a halt.
Sooner or later your connection to the internet will join other people's, like an 'A road' joining the motorway. Loads of people clogging it up at the same time will slow things down.
With ADSL, your 'A road' joins the motorway from the telephone exchange onwards, so you're either sharing your connection with 19 or 49 other people. That's a lot of sharing going on and that's going to slow you down.
With cable, you still share your connection with other people. Your cable 'A road' still joins the shared motorway, it's just the motorway's so much wider, there's room for everyone. And with cable, if there are any snarl-ups appearing, they can be spotted quickly, and more space gets freed up, keeping everyone moving. This is one of the advantages of owning your own network which most ADSL providers don't - you only have to worry about your own traffic.