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Back in the day when analog modems were becoming obsolete, there was a hue and cry from broadband enthusiasts that cable modem technology was inferior infrastructure. These folks all agreed that DOCSIS and cable modems would suffer crippling congestion in neighborhoods. That your cable modem's bandwidth would be shared bandwidth, shared on a medium with all your neighbors up to that head-end, and that this shared medium would inevitably be oversold many times over, and that cable-modem ISPs could never possibly meet bandwidth demands on these local networks. In contrast, DSL technology was sold as "never congested, never shared": that is, your copper pairs would wire up directly to the wire center, and have a dedicated connection into the ISP's backbone (and that ISP was experienced in telecommunications, rather than the entertainment industry) and therefore, DSL was always superior due to its lack of shared mediums. It was a weird argument, because inevitably, every provider's core network is shared to some degree, and cable modems really have not suffered congestion beyond the ordinary. Conversely, DSL also had its strategies for aggregation, overselling, and shared media. But a lot of people believed those stories about topology myths. Personally, I switched from ADSL to cable modem over 18 years ago, and I haven't regretted it. Very stable, always available and reliable, and plenty of bandwidth to spare, for my applications. |
I've lived in and had friends live in apartments with absolutely terrible noisy neighbor problems on coax networks. Too much junk plugged in making all kinds of noise on the same run making internet services close to useless. DSL infrastructure lost out to cable at the start in that area so it got practically no upgrades since it was first implemented. While far more reliable it was ancient speeds at even higher prices.
It seems like it largely took 5G home internet actually being a thing in those areas for the cable companies to start fixing those buildings and rooting out the problems.
Cable modem congestion and line quality issues definitely vary greatly on the operator and the actual location installed at. A cheap old apartment building filled with poor residents is likely to have abysmal line quality. A well-off neighborhood of single family homes probably has no problems with line quality at all.