By now, most of us have been exposed to the world of high-speed internet access at our jobs. In fact, those moments when we were initially amazed by its lightening-fast speed and immediate page-loads have long-since passed, and such instantaneous results have quickly become our standardSo it should come as no surprise that consumers are tiring of dial-up service on their home computers. Your personal e-mail account takes two-minutes to load at home? Unacceptable. Does it take you 10-minutes to find a new recipe on the 15-minute-meal section on your favorite cooking website? Not worth the effort. You might just as well order a pizza on-line, if only, it didn’t feel another hunger pang every… second… it.. took… your… dial-up…connection…to.. looooad.

So unless your employer turns a blind eye you’re using work time to check out the price of Brady Bunch memorabilia on e-bay, chances are you’re in the market for high-speed internet access at home.Cable and DSL are the two main types of high-speed services available to consumers. Both will probably provide service more than 10-times faster than dial-up, but each work in different ways and have different advantages and disadvantages. To help you decide which type of service is best for you, please review the following:

DSL

Turns out that those same phone lines that bring you the painfully slow dial-up service can be utilized to provide fast internet service. The copper wiring that connects to your home phones is able to handle much more data than is needed to transmit voice data, utilizes that extra bandwidth by sending digital signals to your computer.

Once you install DSL, you’ll find this digital signal is being sent through every phone jack in you’re home, and  you’ll hear an electronic-sounding digitized buzz in the background of though your telephone’s receiver. But your DSL provider will supply you with an adapter to plug into your phone jack, which will automatically filter out this buzz.

One limitation to DSL service is distance. DSL service is distance sensitive, which means the signal’s quality decreases the further away you are from one of the main switching stations. If you live in an urban area, you may not notice a drop-off in service, however DSL service is not available in all areas, particularly in rural settings, where it can be a long distance between you and the nearest switching station.

CableCable Modems utilize another pipeline already a fixture in most households, the coaxial cable used to bring those 500 TV channels into your home. Just as the copper wiring is cable of delivering more than voice signals to your phone, the coaxial cable can deliver more than just TV signals. The data for your computer is able to piggy back through the same deliver pipeline as your TV signal.Unlike DSL, cable is not distance sensitive, which means you can receive the same signal quality whether you live 10 feet from the nearest switching station or 10 miles from it. This may make cable service an option in a rural area, where DSL service may not be available.However, one of cable’s downsides is that service levels may vary depending on how many people are using the service in your area. This is because different subscribers in any given area will share the same node or channel. This may also enable a technically-savvy neighbor to illegally gain access to your computer, but such a danger can be mitigated by using the standard firewall, virus and spyware protection you should have on most systems anyway.Though cable and DSL use different pipelines to deliver high-speed internet service to your computer, the service level and speed of each are comparable. When deciding between the two types of service, the bottom-line may end up being the price. If you already have cable service for your TV, chances are your cable subscriber with offer a price break on its high-speed internet service. Otherwise, DSL may be your better bottom-line value.