The performance of cable is highly dependant on what those who live near you (in tech. terms, the people on the same headend as you) do. This is because, as with the TV you get on that cable, it's a broadcast medium and your cable modem filters out what isn't yours. DSL does not have this property and can be considered more stable. Some phone wiring is old and crappy though, and DSL will either flat-out not work, or work poorly. I don't know what the situation is in your area but typically the telco will only guarantee your phone line's quality to a level well short of what you need for DSL. Check with your neighbours, if they have DSL, if they had any problems getting it, especially if their houses are a similar age to yours.

As for speed, cable has been much faster than DSL in the past, but new developments such as ADSL2+ are closing that gap, offering a theoretical maximum of 24Mbps.

I would talk to people in your area, and check out what speeds and what plans are available in your area. All other things being equivalent (or close enough considering what you intend to do on the Internet), I would take DSL over cable.

Hey Tess Hon;
We have cable and had them come out and replace their modem once over a year ago since it was still under warranty. The cable guy told me if we have probs after the warranty runs out to consider buying a modem since the ones the cable company provide are not very good. He suggested the Morotola Surfboard Modem SB-5120, and he said you can usually get them at WalMart for $59. We have not had any further problems, so I'm still using the cable company modem.
Does your TV go out when the internet goes out? If not it may very well be a modem problem. Good luck you sexy thing....
Joe

We just replaced the modem on our cable connection, too. We'd had the old modem about five years and they said we were extremely lucky to get by for that long. Usually most have been replaced within a couple of years. Amazing. You wouldn't think there'd be anything to wear out.

Oh well, the new modem seems to have gotten rid of the problems we were having with service dropping off several times a day.

I move alot all over the country and have used various providers for both Cable and DSL.

I have found that in general Cable gives you a higher speed, but can be more quirky and less reliable. With cable usually the bandwidth is shared for any area even though your suppose to have X amount of bandwidth for you.

The DSL bandwidth is generally less than Cable, but how it is setup you should have a fixed amount and it shouldn't go below that regardless of how many people are using it.
You have a fixed amount going from you to the provider, with the cable yours ties in with a number of other peoples on the way to the provider.

As far as reliablity it's probally more so the provider in your area than the type of service you have.

I have had cable internet that would never be down, and then in Southern florida it was really crap we were plagued with problems.
Now in Virginia it's not too bad but we will get intermittent problems

DSL I have never had problems other than them occasionally running some sort of maintenance that results in some downtime, which you will probally have occasionally no matter what you use.