@ KennyR,
But doesn't cable take a performance hit if lots of people in your neighbourhood are downloading at once?
Yes, it can happen, but it usually doesn't. The cable providers are very good at keeping track of how many people are on the system. When they reach the threshhold of their specifications, they add another channel. It certainly holds true for me. I live in a pretty populated neighborhood, but I've never had a problem with my cable modem being slow.
ADSL doesn't suffer this.
You should add onto the end of that "on its own channel" because, yes, ADSL can be affected by a similar type of slowdown. If the network equipment that your DSL modem connects to at the CO is saturated, the slowdown will happen. I did have this problem at my old apartment. The CO only had one connectivity point for my neighborhood at the time with over 100 connections on it. They had a publicly available network activity monitor which showed the box was always 95% busy during peak times. That, of course, ended up with everyone on it going slow.
Also, regardless of the above, your data transmission speed will only go as fast as the weakest/slowest link in the chain. If your on a 10 Mbit cable modem and you download from a server that's running on a 2400 bps modem (not likely, but possible), then you'll still only get 2400 bps speed.
