"The more customers that use cable in your immediate neighborhood the greater chances of a drop in speed."

The issue is "Contention" and is a factor on all high-speed connections be they cable or DSL. As you have noticed, you are a victim of high usage on your local cable system.

However if everyone in your area switched to DSL, the same issue would probably manifest itself there as well.

Whatever connection technoogy is used, individual users do not have exclusive access to the local data stream and so when a large number of users are using the stream simultaneously its bandwith capacity is reached and it will react by reducig the amount of bandwidth available to each user, so performance per user will suffer.

Business users pay significantly more for their high-speed internet access (for a given nominal data rate) because the "Contention Ratio" for the data stream they use will be a lot lower than that specified for domestic usage - the lower the ratio the less users are sharing the bandwidth so individual performance is maintained for longer under high usage conditions.

I'm on ADSL here in the UK, our street doesnt have cable; the feedback at work is that the Cable users reckon they get the best deal in terms of performance and availability

[This message has been edited by MacAllcock (edited 01-12-2007).]