Depending where you are going I'd look into your local phone company's ADSL offering. The former Bell system local operating companies understand that the future is digital. I was speaking with a Verizon tech who was repairing a downed 200 pair local cable and he told me that they are all being retrained to think of "dial tone over DSL, rather than DSL over dialtone." Thus, they are/have switched the emphasis. I run Verizon DSL and a near T1 rate downlink and 368 Kbps uplink and it has been very reliable. Cable puts you on a party line and the more users in your locale the slower you will get, ADSL is a direct link to a phone company router. Jack
I've been with Earthlink for many years and I'm quite happy with them. I did have some problems with random disconnects in the beginning, but it quickly went away after upgrading to a newer modem. I did replace the generic filters with the better quality ones. Good luck and happy trading
Saying that cable is much better than DSL is meaningless and incorrect. Some cable implementations are better than some DSL implementations and vice-versa. As a generic technology cable's weakness is that it is shared medium at the neighborhood level while DSL gets you a dedicated circuit (and bandwidth) back to the central office DSLAM at which point your traffic is aggregated with everyone elses (e.g. you fight for bandwidth). With cable you are competiting for bandwidth sooner and if your immediate area is oversubscribed then you will feel it during peak periods. The downside with DSL is that it is very distance (and line noise) sensitive so many people can't get service or the service speed they want. My personal experience with Comcast (my local cable company) is that they have a television service mindset and do not take internet service outages very seriously and their support is spotty at best. Contrast this with an independent DSL ISP whose only business is internet service. Still as with all things the devil is in the details - research the specific cable and DSL choices for your new area and see what other folks are saying about them. DSLReports.com
I have found that DSL is in general, more reliable than most cable systems: that is if you have a good dsl connection at your location