An organization that has as much aggregation down to the distribution point - that's the one that will win. Give cable modem the advantage in ability to upgrade plant to reach these higher speeds, Harris adds. For DSL it is harder because they can't segment the plant as easily. Clay Ryder, vice president and chief analyst for Zona Research Inc., sees both technologies prone to data traffic jams - it is just a question of where the bottleneck occurs. With DSL, you don't have a headend problem with distribution, but all of those lines eventually go into a network router and that can bog down.
All networks have a choke point.
It just depends on where in the network it comes. Taylor, meanwhile, points out that for practical purposes, most users' computers can't process more than 10 Mbps, neutering cable's claims to higher speed. That, and shared bandwidth restrictions, make it a matter of promises versus delivery. But in the real world, DSL delivers a guaranteed rate and it's always there. Tie While DSL providers have made much of cable modems' security risks inherent with the shared-network scheme, there is little agreement as to which technology in fact has the greater security issue.