You are playing word games and trying to confuse people, djrobx. Nobody is saying that Uverse is a private connection into the Internet and cable isn't. There are differences in the network topology that cause them to behave differently.
With Uverse (and DSL) you have your own connection through to the VRAD (or DSLAM) in your neighborhood. The connection from the VRAD to the central office (and on to the internet) has a much greater bandwidth capacity. So, the point where your traffic merges with the traffic from your neighbors is at the point where the network gets more capacity.
With cable internet, your "private" connection ends at the pole in your backyard or at a common junction box near your home. Your traffic merges with that of your neighbors at that point. The connection there has no greater network capacity than your private line...it's one common loop and that's why if a couple of your neighbors are big downloaders, your connection can suffer.
It's easy for a neighborhood cable loop to become oversubscribed causing the slowness and it is possible that a VRAD or a DSLAM would become oversubscribed, but I think that is very very rare.
I had line quality issues which caused DSL problems here at my home and they were diagnosed and corrected when I had uverse installed. My DSL download speed would vary now and again and the DSL modem would lose sync periodically. The issue was a couple of cross taps on my line and when they were removed, the errors went away.
If I had to guess, I would venture that the issues that you had were not because your neighborhood VRAD was oversubscribed or because there was some sort of capacity issue overall. I would bet that you had noise on your line or perhaps a bad port at the VRAD.
Message Edited by callmeox on 07-31-2008 07:59 AM
