I am moving to a new home March 1st and need to decide between Cable\Digital Cable\Dish\DirectTV. I will also want broadband, which factors into this too. I will need to put the signal into 3 bedrooms, a living room, kitchen and a family room across three levels of the house. I would like to do this in the best quality for the price manner. Cable\Digital Cable is figured in due to the extremely high cost of broadband via the sats (almost twice the price a month)

What would you recommend and why?

Thanks.....Tony

DSL for computers, DirecTV for TV.

Why? DSL is more secure and reliable than cable modems, and DirecTV has more selecttions and is more reliable than cable, which has service problems. Weather affects cable more than it does satellite, at least in my experience.

I hated my cable company, as they were hard to reach and frustrating when I did reach them. I've never needed to call DirecTV.

The DSL is a constant, and cable computing varies with neighborhood usage. Plus, your entire neighborhood is your network. No, thanks!

Larry
www.fineelectricco.com

Hi Larry,

Thanks for your imput. Yes, I know cable networks are shared bandwidth, however, the cable in my area seems to have a large enough backbone to support 1.5 down, which is very expensive to do via DSL. I know that ATT has a 10Gig backbone so it shouldn't be a huge deal. Since I won't be doing any hosting I won't need high up speeds, which are very costly to get via DSL.

There a few misconceptions about DSL that are around too. That being DSL is guarnteed speed. If you check with your DSL company most won't guarantee speeds any longer. With DSL you aren't getting any actual circuit like you do with a T1, so you are still sharing bandwidth with the other users (not as many as with cable). I know on Ameritech's DSL page it states that you can get down speeds upto 768kbps, well cable I can get down speeds upto 1.5mbps (used to be 3-4!!! until the Excite@home debacle...now they capped speeds!) and up speed upto 128 so that works for me.

Security is also a mute point as I will be setting up, via the Lynksys cable router, a firewall and a DMZ using an old Win98 machine. Networking is my profession so this is old hat to setup something like this.

What I am really trying to find out is what the best choice is between Cable and the sat companies. With the way I want to run things I want to get the best qualty for the $$ without spending a fortune for equipment.

Why would you choose DirectTV over cable/Dish? Again thanks for your input....Tony

I have cable modem service and I have a friend with DSL. They both work very well. We both have them going through LinkSys routers which provide a very good firewall. The biggest difference I can see is that I pay $29.95/mo for the service and he pays $45 or $50/mo.

When I got my cable modem service DSL wasn't an option. When he got his DSL service cable wasn't, and still isn't, an option. I'd just go with whichever is available and cheaper.

I don't know anything about the satellite broadband services.

It is almost impossible to give a generic one-size-fits-all answer to this because cable service varies so drastically from one system to the next. Where I live, the analog cable offering when we built 4 years ago was pathetic (few channels, high price), which forced me to consider satellite for the first time. Went with a dish and bottom-tier cable for locals as didn't get adequate reception without a bigger antenna rig than I wanted to mess with.

Just 3 miles south it is a different franchise that had much better picture quality and very extensive channel offerings, and yet with pricing in the same ballpart. Had they been available to us we'd have never looked into satellite. Both operations are now owned by Charter, but the one to the south has extensive broadband while our operation hasn't extended it to our area yet.