Comcast

seriously sucks. I just ran a speed test... 561kb/s. That's less than a tenth of the advertised speed.

i tried out yahoo DSL once and called them complaining. They said "we only guarantee the speed on our network". I then connected my cable modem and browsed the exact same pages at 8x the speed. You do realize a couple of things though: Bandwidth varies during the day due to usage. Cable modems share bandwidth with everyone nearby. And the speed advertised is kilobit, not byte (probably) and finally, it is a combo of up and download. Oh and one more thing i forgot. I was getting 2MB/sec from my last broadband provider until i installed a hardware firewall and it cut it down to about 300k/s. I just got 10.0MB cable internet and i haven't got to use it yet. I am hoping my shiny-new LinkSys doesn't do the same.

They advertise 6mb/s download speeds. I clocked in at 561kb. See my problem?

Theres alot of speed-decreasing factors that an ISP cant do anything about, thats just the way the internet is.

kB/s, kb/s, KiB/s, or Kib/s?

I typed specifically what I meant. They advertise 6mb/s: "m" for base-10 measurement (1,000,000), and "b" for bit. I also used a similar measurement for my speed: 561kb/s. "k" for base-10 (1,000) and "b" for bit.

You may need to read the fineprint then... it's possible they meant one of the various other permutations of case in order to sell you this line.

Although, you have to realise that the speed realised over a DSL connection depends almost wholly on the line quality and distance between endpoints. My plan is advertised as 24 Mb/s downstream, but I only get a bit over 3, as I am a long distance from my telephone exchange.

Cable connections have greater bandwidth, but, as Lord Orwell said, it is shared over an area and is combined upstream and downstream.