Last year, a co-worker of mine called his cable company to order DSL. Yesterday, when I went to see my podiatrist, we began discussing broadband options. I told him that I had DSL at home. He said he had a broadband service with Comcast that he believed to be DSL. Obviously, my co-worker and my podiatrist, even though both are intelligent men, did not understand the difference between cable broadband and DSL.

Both cable broadband service and DSL provide speeds many times faster than dial-up, ranging from 700 kbps all the way to 10,000 kbps (10 mbps). Dial-up is capped at 56 kbps. In addition, both of these types of broadband services provide "always on" or instant Internet connections, without the need to dial up and without tying up a phone line. In most areas, cable connections are a little faster than DSL, but speeds vary from area to area and from provider to provider. However, there are some major differences between cable and DSL.

Cable broadband service is provided by your local cable company. It comes into your house via the same cable that delivers cable TV. To get connected to cable broadband service, a technician from the cable company generally must come out to your house for an installation process in which a broadband connection is split off from the TV connection. The broadband connection is then plugged into a cable modem which is then plugged into your computer or router.

With cable, it doesn't matter how close you live to cable company's office or plant. If it's available in your area, it's available at the same maximum speed to everyone, regardless of where they live within that area. What usually does matter, however, is how many others in your neighborhood are also subscribing, as you are sharing the bandwidth with them. When a lot of them are logged on at the same time that you are, you could notice a significant speed reduction.

DSL, or Digital Subscriber Line, is provided by a phone company. In general, no professional installation is needed for DSL. When you order it, your phone company turns your service on from its office and sends you a DSL modem and some filters. DSL uses a different partition of your existing phone line's bandwidth (than what is used for voice), so no extra line is needed. To get connected, you plug one end of a DSL modem into a regular phone jack and the other end into your computer or router. The filters are used to eliminate potential DSL static from phone jacks in which phones are used. These filters fit easily into the phone jacks and then the phone connections are plugged into the filters.

Unlike cable, with DSL it makes a big difference how close you live to the phone company's office. If you live too far away, you won't even qualify for the service at all. Even if you live close enough to qualify, you still might be so far out that you can only get speeds near the lower end of the range that the phone company advertises. However, you have direct line to the phone company and do not share your bandwidth with your neighbors, so it doesn't matter how many of them are also DSL subscribers or how many of them are logged on at a given time.