Saturday, November 29, 2008

Comcast Internet - A Good Alternative to Lesser Internet Services

By Rachel Smith

These days everyone wants a high speed Internet connection in their own home, but many people are confused about how to go about getting it. This is largely because of all of the different types of high speed Internet services that are being marketed to the general public. After all, there's satellite Internet access, DSL, municipal WiFi, and even some dial up services marketing themselves as alternatives to high speed Internet access. When it comes to getting the best kind of high speed Internet connection, broad band cable from a company like Comcast is the best alternative for a variety of reasons.

Broad band cable high speed Internet access provides more bandwidth than any other kind of high speed Internet service that's available to most residential users. Most will provide around 8 mbps and Comcast comes with a special service that's called Power Boost, which can bump that speed up to about 12 mbps for brief periods of time. This is a lot more bandwidth than most other types of services can offer. Municipal WiFi is the only one that comes close, but it has plenty of problems associated with it. For one thing, it's not that widely available. For another, because it's based on radio signals, it's really not that secure- people who know what they're doing can sit at your curb with a laptop and see what you're looking at online.

Another popular alternative is DSL. DSL provides Internet access over phone lines, which makes it widely available. But those phone lines aren't very good at providing bandwidth. After all, phone lines are skinny compared to the coaxial cables that Comcast uses. Because of that difference, DSL only delivers about 2 or 3 mbps, to Comcast's 8 or 12. Often times, DSL service is much slower than that because of the distance that the signal has to travel over phone lines.

Satellite based Internet service is very widely available, but it has enough problems with it that it's really the Internet connection of last resort best left for people who live out in the middle of nowhere! Satellite Internet has about the same top end speed as DSL, but it costs more than broad band digital cable high speed Internet acces from Comcast and DSL put together on a monthly basis and requires hundreds of dollars worth of equipment just to set the service up.

The dial up Internet connections that market themselves as alternatives to high speed Internet aren't worth bothering with. They're capable of downloading web pages faster than normal dial up connections, but only because they filter out the pictures to some extent- the faster the download, the lower the resolution of the pictures. It does nothing to accelerate software, video, audio, or picture downloads.

By contrast, broad band cable high speed Internet access through a cable TV company like Comcast has a lot of advantages. Basically, it's a high speed Internet connection that normal people can use to take advantage of the video, music, and other resources that the Internet has to offer these days. - 17564

About the Author:

No comments: