“Residential High-Speed Internet access at a small price.”

The value of Residential High-Speed Internet

Written by: USaveDSL Staff - May 24, 2013

For residential customers, DSL or Cable Internet Service offers high-speed Internet access for a very reasonable rate. Many don't realize that DSL or Cable Internet speeds can often exceed T1 speeds (1.5Mbps), sometimes by a wide margin. While residential DSL or Cable Internet Service can cost from $20 to $45 per month, T1 service will cost several hundred dollars.

Why so much cost difference? T1 service is a service offering for businesses. T-1 service has a fixed up/down speed. The key difference between business T1 service and residential DSL or Cable Internet Service is that T1s will have certain service guarantees that are not available with residential services. Businesses are willing to pay higher rates for service guarantees that can include uptime, latency, packet loss and other parameters. To a business that requires maximum performance and uptime from their Internet connection, the guarantees are well worth the extra costs.

But, does that mean residential services perform poorly? Not at all! Generally, residential service is only slightly less reliable than the more expensive counterparts. Also, residential services are typically oversubscribed. This means that there is not enough capacity to provide all users full speed if all users simultaneously used the service. This will cause temporary slowdowns during busy times. Most of the time however, users will enjoy normal speeds.

DSL and Cable High Speed Internet services are so popular because the residential user's biggest concern is price. The 90% price discount more than compensates for occasional slow periods for the home user.

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