Lately I’ve been seeing quite a few commercials for Comcast High Speed Internet. It’s a cable company that offers Internet access via cable modem. What galls me is that all the commercials emphasize the high speed available and they say brag about how much faster it than DSL. Not that it’s untrue, but it’s only PARTIALLY true.

Cable modems allow faster download speeds but slower upload speeds. Example:

Basic DSL Cable
Download 1500 kbps 4000 kbps
Upload 1500 kbps 400 kbps

I like to use InternetFrog to see what my current upload/download speeds are. Right now, I actually do have Comcast Internet service, so I have a cable modem. As of right now, my speeds are 4.39 Mbps download and 415 kbps upload.

It’s all fine if you download a lot, but when it’s time to upload things, it averages 8 times faster than dialup (as opposed to over 80 times faster than dialup for downloads). Basic DSL, on the other hand averages 27 times faster than dialup for both. Or, to put it another way, cable modems are about 300% faster than basic DSL for downloading but 27% as fast when uploading.

So it’s all in how you put it. Yes, cable modems are “blazingly fast” for downloads, but I think commercials should say that it applies to downloads. Verbally. Not just in fine print at the bottom of the screen that’s gone so quickly you can’t even read it. They don’t have to say how much slower they are when uploading, but they should at least say that it’s DOWNLOADS that are so much faster.

[tags]internet, DSL, cable modem, download speed, commercials[/tags]