The Best (and Worst) ISPs

Faster Services on the Way

Broadband transmission speeds have jumped in the last year as DSL and cable providers install equipment in more neighborhoods, which reduces reliance on slower copper links to the Internet's backbone network. Telephone companies are rolling out "fiber to the curb": optical lines that run to residential blocks, often in place of copper, whether underground or along poles. The lines to and within homes are still copper, since rewiring at that level is too expensive, notes IDC analyst Sterling Perrin. The primary benefit of fiber is speed: Data travels much faster over light than it does over copper, and fiber supports more lines in a single cable than will fit in a standard copper line.

Cable companies' high-capacity coaxial cables give them a built-in advantage over DSL providers in delivering video and other high-bandwidth applications. DSL's copper lines were designed to carry low-bandwidth voice calls. New signal-processing technologies may bring DSL speeds closer to those of the cable network, however. The new VDSL standard, which carriers are beginning to implement, supports transmission speeds to 10 mbps. Further, the VDSL2 proposal calls for speeds as high as 100 mbps and availability as soon as 2006, says IDC's Perrin.

Customers typically don't need to upgrade their equipment to benefit from such broadband speed increases; their modems will simply run at the higher speeds. (Of course, you probably won't get the speed boost unless you upgrade your service plan, since providers instruct modems to stay within certain performance levels despite the available bandwidth.) Like so many things in the world, you get what you pay for.