DSL No matter who, people say stay away from, lags during gaming. FO..... is the $hit Comcast in New Engalnd 50/50 chance of it sucking. Joe is stuck with comcast and tells me it blows 50% of the time.
I have Verizon DSL and get slightly higher pings to just about every server than Bubba who has Comcast cable. I don't notice any lag necessarily (that isn't caused by my PC or the server), but it is slightly slower than the cable. I'll let Bubba talk about his experience with Comcast as I am not sure what he thinks of it.
FIOS is coming to my town in December (according to a lineman outside my house a couple weeks ago). It is supposed to be really fast and allow phone and television at the same time. THey are talking about having high-speed internet access being slightly higher than dsl in terms of cost, but much, much faster. If they have it available where your going to be living, definitely check it out. Assuming that I can afford it, I am going to switch over asap once they start actual service here.
Bear in mind, DSL vs Cable varies from place to place. I mean DC is comcast and so is New England, but they both were built by completely different people.
I have had both Comcast and DSL. The Comcast is no doubt faster and I tend to get better pings, BUT I have had many many many more issues of lag. That is not to say i didn't have lag on my DSL, but comcast has been much laggier more often. I truthfully am not impressed by either. Verizon has been more responsive and trusting when I call to tell them what the problem is. Comcast's service has sucked bigtime. I unfortunatly can only get comcast at my house, and well if verizon ever runs the DSL out here I would switch within minutes.
Also in NH at least Verizon keeps upping their speed and dropping their price. Comcast has upped their speed and their price.
In the DC area you may be able to get some 3rd party providers, I have heard good things about many of them. Now it's true they use verizons phone network or comcasts cable network, but at least they will try to help when there is an issue.
One other thing I forgot to add, Verizon pins it's IP's behind a firewall. So unless you pay to have a static (about ~65 more /mo) there is no hosting anything on your machine. Comcast doesn't offcially allow you to host anything but your IP can be foudn by the outside world. You can run Dynamic DNS.
I called Verizon to see if I can get FiOS at the house. The rep says, oh, you are with Verizon South. You'll have to talk to someone else. I asked her what she means by Verizon South? Turns out, it's actually GTE and not the old Bell Atlantic like you guys have. Apparently, they are both Verizon, but still maintain some seperation.
She also said Verizon South was limited in it's deployment of FiOS. FYI, it's 5Mb down and 2Mb up and it's about the same price as DSL. If you get a yearly contract, it's under $40.
One thing to keep in mind. I may say DC, but I will live no where near DC. I am outside Manassas and it's nowhere near as urban as the cities closer to DC. From what I can tell, I get Verizon DSL or Comcast. I may be able to get a 3rd party DSL provider, but I'll have to see how much the cost is.
Oh, the joy of finding decent Internest service.....
Well from a to far too north and don't forget west boy, my opinion probably won't help. But I would see if you could test the actual providers for ping (get a trial run for 30 days I know they are real competitive nowadays). For instance: Oh wait and don't forget the fact I don't know shit! And I think I read something about this in a post from Bubba that was about routing so blame him if I am wrong.
I switched ISP's from a local one at 256k to msn at 5mb. Both wired through Qwest phone lines ADSL, with no real ping enhancement except it being more consistent. I thought I'd get tons of low pings but most hover around 150-250 for me. Once or twice a 50or<, occasionally a 75. Oh and now I can play online and the old lady can surf with no real noticable difference
Always remember bandwidth is the weight of the football player not the speed at which he is running. But it's both his weight and speed that make a good hit.