I've heard that in a few years (or perhaps more than a just a few) we
may be able to rent movies by download rather than going to the local
video rental. But with movies at roughly 7GB, that would be a long
download.

That is, unless broadband is getting faster every year. Even then it
seems a long way til 7G is managable.

But my question is, is broadband of today faster than broadband of 3
years ago, and will it be faster 3 years from now?

I have cable, and don't know much about DSL, but I guess my question
is 'on average'.  I imagine cable and dsl are close to the same speed,
and growing at close to the same speed (for competitive reasons if
nothing else).

Thank you,
Patrice

Yes.

It will only be just a couple megs per second faster that it's closest
competition.  If DSL, or even Satellite gets faster broadband with
it's almost unlimited speed potential will just slide ahead to avoid
having any real competition.  If their turns out to have a huge demand
for downloadable movies, which I don't really see.  You can already
get movies on demand from just about all cable providers.  It may have
a slight impact on the internet speeds.  The real question should be
what is the maximum speed you can safely and accurately pass on a
standard broadband line, that would probably be the end answer.

Well let me tell you my experience with comcast.  Back in the day when
@home was around i was getting speeds of 1.5 mpbs (if you know what a
t1 is it is about that speed).  Thats great, problem is you will be
shelling out $50 bucks a month for it.  Shortly after becomming
comcast they doubled the speeds to 3.0 mpbs and as of right now i
believe they are boasting 6.0 mpbs (which I personally either didnt
see the speed difference or the cable modem i bought can only do so
much.)  But at the moment I can download at about 300 KB /s and upload
at about 50 KB /s.  If you do go with comcast they also give you free
basic cable.

I would suggest cable only if you :
are an extreme gamer who wants to have a ping well under 100
Download incredibly large files constantly
Wish to download music in 5 - 10 seconds, not minutes.
Dont care about the cost

My boss has sbc yahoo and it is SLOW compared to comcast.  Basically
3x the speed of 56k and he is paying 29 a month.

http://www.bandwidthplace.com/speedtest/about/tech.php?a=types
this will show you some speed comparisons, can also use this site to
compare your speed to the average in your state.  You can also search
for service in your area too with it.


I would suggest having a good virus scanner on your computer since
your cable internet will be on ALL THE TIME.  That or hit the standby
button which will disconnect the modem from the internet.  Great thing
is if you do get a virus that has dialers (dials things like phone sex
crap and charges outrageous amounts on your phone bill(hundreds of
dollars) and you not even know about it.) your modem has no where to
dial as it is not on a phone line like dsl.

So basically yes, broadband is getting faster every year.  Will it get
faster? Yes,  But of course there will be limitations in the future,
but hopefully we will see the dramatic drop in OC lines.  Biggest
problem with OC is the line is expensive and the infastructure is not
feasable for home users yet.

while im at it...

http://www.cable-vs-dsl.com/dsl-vs-cable-chart.php

That's one great link, Pimp469-ga, I'm switching from Cable to DSL.

I hope the Cable Companies don't see that link or they'll start to worry.

Shortest answer...

Yes.

More detailed answer...

The technology for DSL (specifically ADSL on the consumer side) and
Cable has been set in stone for a while.  The limiting factor in
acheiving theoretical speeds is mainly though the medium of travel, as
opposed to technology.

ADSL runs through a phone line.  Most people will ignorantly state (I
hesitate to use ignorant, as it implies a negative connotation) that
since DSL runs through the same medium as a dial-up modem, it will be
slower than Cable.  This simply is not true.  DSL lines utilize the
frequency ranges not used by a conventional phone line.  Vocal data
only takes up 0-4kHz of frequency.  The cables that telephones run
through have a maximum of about 1.5 mHz.  This is approximately 1100
kHz of unused frequency.  If ADSL were to max out the full throughput
of a standard telephone wire, it would have a theoretical max speed of
about 8 Mbps downstream, far beyond the theoretical max of
conventional Cable internet.

The limiting factor preventing consumers to receive all 8 Mbps of
bandwidth is line quality.  If ISPs were to push this max downstream,
there would be much line degradation and interference, due to the
relatively slow throughput of a telephone line (as opposed to a Cable
internet's coaxial cable line).

Several companies are trying to overcome this by installing fiber
lines to replace the telephone wire.  A fiber line straight through to
a household would SIGNIFICANTLY increase the theoretical max speed of
a consumer DSL connection.  This new DSL (called VDSL, or Very
High-Bitrate DSL) has a theoretical max of 52 Mbps (that means
download speed would be close to 6,500 kBps...note that 8 Kbps = 1
kBps).  This VDSL is planned to be available in years to come.  So you
can see that once new mediums are installed, movie rental seems like a
feasible idea.

However, I don't know if they'll follow through with that, depending
on how movie companies deal with piracy.

On a side note, don't believe those Cable internet commercials that
proclaim that Cable internet is up to 5x faster than DSL.  That's just
a marketing ploy.  The trick is to find a good ISP.  A good ISP will
get you reliable fast connections, regardless of Cable vs. DSL.

With modern compression codecs like <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DivX">DivX</a> or <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264">H.264</a>, a two-hour
high-quality video is about 1 GB, not 7 GB.  Most DVDs use <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-2">MPEG-2</a> compression,
which is MUCH less efficient.

I might be little late to answer...but the broadband is developing
very fast. Its all about competetion,speed and Quality of service that
the service providers are fighting. Now every thing has become optical
fibre networks which can carry gigabits of data. Now here in my
university the download rate is 500kb/s and upload is almost same.
After three years it will be almost doubled.If you can download a
movie with 1mb/s you will be able to see very nice quality online.
Watching DVD-disk is different from watching dvd-Rip online they both
have the same quality but the data is almost 1/10th. so it wont be a
problem to watch dvd-movies online. If you rip 9gig of DVD-data you
would get 1.4gig on your pc.so your conception on this is a little bit
wrong.If you still have any questions ...please let me know.

dinesh