Explained: Internet Cable vs DSL vs Fiber vs Satellite vs 56K

56K Dial-Up Internet

Now we’ll Focus on the old 56k dialup which helps lead into DSL. 56K dial-up was the main source of the internet back in the ’90s and is still used by a small number of people today but it’s pretty terrible internet technology by today’s standard.

• It was easy to get since it uses a home phone line.
• It has some issues such as not being able to use the internet and home phone at the same time. If you’re connected to the internet on 56K and someone picks up the house phone, then you’ll be disconnected from the internet.
• You also had to connect (dial-up) to the internet, it wouldn’t remain on 24/7.
• Another issue was that 56k dial-up only really achieved a speed of 53kbps, this meant loading a webpage that had images would load very slowly.

DSL Internet

Things improved with DSL which stands for digital subscriber line. DSL, just like 56k dialup, gets internet through a home phone line but is vastly superior. 

• You can use your home phone and it will not impact your DSL internet and unlike 56k dialup which requires a manual connection to be made, DSL is always on and connected 24/7.
• Because DSL uses a home phone line connection, it’s widely available and quite popular. 
• The speed bracket is 5-50Mbps download and average 1-10Mbps upload. Again, these are common speeds, the speed you achieve might be outside the speed brackets I mentioned. In rare cases, you might find an ISP that provides 100Mbps download speed.
• DSL has one major advantage over cable. DSL isn’t as susceptible to speed slowdowns like cable as more people in your neighbourhood use DSL.
• Going back to another positive point is that chances are you won’t require any special installation to get started with DSL as it’ll use your home’s existing phone wiring.
• Lastly, because the speed it provides is a bit slower than cable and it uses existing home phone wiring, it’s relatively cheap for the subscription service.
• A disadvantage is that it’s more likely to cut out during a heavy rainstorm vs cable or fiber. That doesn’t mean a regular rainstorm, so it won’t cut out several times a year. I’m referring to very heavy rainstorms we get here in southern Ontario like once a year. That of course might be different depending on where you live.

Fiber Optic Internet

Switching over to fiber optic (aka optical fiber), this is where things get interesting for today’s standards.

• Inside the wire are thin strands of glass which sometimes have the same diameter as a human hair, in some cases, there might be strands of plastic instead of glass.
  • Within a fiber optic cable, there could be a few strands or up to a few hundred strands of glass or plastic.
• I’m just doing a high-level explanation here but essentially light pulses through the fiber optic glass or the plastic and that’s how the data is transmitted.
  • The light tends to bounce within the fiber optic cable as it travels to its destination and for that reason, it tends to travel about 30% slower than the speed of light when measuring it over a distance traveled.
    • The amount of times the light bounces depends on how the cable might be curved.
• One of the best things about fiber is that it has low attenuation which means it carries well over longer distances compared to DSL and cable. Essentially fiber optic can send data further than cable or DSL before the signal becomes weak.
• The biggest selling point of fiber is the speed, as of today in most cases, ISPs will provide speeds up to 1.5Gbps. These are incredible speeds by today’s standards and will be for years to come. In many cases, this will be considered overkill.
  • What’s unique about fiber vs cable and DSL is that the upload speed for fiber is usually the same or close to being the same as your download speed. For example, if you have a fiber 500Mbps down connection, there’s a good chance that you’ll get 500Mbps upload speed. With cable internet at 500 down, you’ll probably get like 20Mbps up.
• Fiber also isn’t susceptible to slowing down like cable internet, when more people in your neighbourhood use the service at the same time as you.
• In addition, fiber is also less likely to go down from external causes such as a heavy rainstorm vs DSL.

Fiber isn’t perfect. It does have its own disadvantages.

• The first is cost, it’s much more expensive to run fiber optic within a building for a company’s internal network vs copper in say Ethernet cables. The same can be said about fiber vs DSL and cable. DSL and cable also being copper-based are much easier to provide to homes for an ISP instead of fiber.
  • This is also why fiber optic is very limited in availability for people’s homes, it’s not that common yet.
  • Even if fiber is available in your area, it’s likely that the monthly subscription is expensive.
• Fiber is also more susceptible to being damaged if the cable is physically bent at too sharp an angle. When handling it, you’ll want to be careful.

Satellite Internet

Last up we have satellite internet. This is the type of internet technology you’ll want to avoid and only use if cable, DSL, and fiber isn’t available for your home. There are a shocking amount of people in America and here in Canada that don’t have access to high-speed internet and must rely on satellites. Why? Because big internet service providers don’t want to invest in building an infrastructure for small communities.

• Satellite internet is exactly like it sounds. You’ll have a satellite dish at your home from your ISP and a modem to send and receive data. Your satellite dish will send a signal to a satellite in Earth’s orbit, then the signal goes down to your ISP’s satellite dish. From your ISP’s station, the signal is sent over the internet.
• This might sound cool but it has some major drawbacks.
  • Speeds average between 10-100mbps download and relatively slow upload, even slower than DSL. However, 10Mbps is the most common speed.
  • In addition, you’re most likely going to be given an allowance of how much data you can download a day or per month. After you hit that cap, you’ll either get charged for additional usage per Gigabyte of data, or your speed will be throttled and slowed down a lot. Keep in mind that ISP providers of DSL, cable, and fiber can also have a data usage cap, but it’s most common with satellite plans.
• Because the signal for data goes from your home dish, to orbit and down to your ISP, this causes a fair amount of latency.
  • Latency is how fast data travels from one point to another, it’s not the same as download speed like 500mbps download speed, latency is very different.
    • This means satellite internet is a poor experience for online gaming. You can be in a multiplayer match and press jump on your controller but your character might jump a few seconds later which makes for a horrible experience. The same would happen for VOIP calling like Zoom or Teams. You’ll experience delays in your call. After you finish speaking, the person on the other end might start hearing your audio a few seconds later, when they talk it might take a few seconds to get to you. This could make for an awkward call where you start talking over each other because you might not realize about the delay.
    • Satellite disadvantages don’t stop there. If there are buildings blocking the way your satellite dish is pointing in, it can interfere with your signal.
    • Satellite internet can also easily go down from storms, it’s not very stable.

Basically, you’ll want to avoid satellite internet unless you absolutely have no choice.

So which should you get? That really depends on what you want to do. As of today, cable is the best bang for buck and the most commonly used technology.