Staying with cable for now

Mum and Dad have returned from Fiji after being over there for four months. As a birthday/Fathers’ Day/anniversary/welcome home present for Dad, Nigel and I decided to buy a wireless ADSL modem/router. Essentially we wanted to allow Dad to use his laptop from anywhere in the house and possibly across the road in the park, and later to connect to the Internet via ADSL when Nigel and I finally fly the nest. We settled on the ZyXEL P-661HW. Right now we’re still on Bigpond cable paying $69.95. I’m happy to pay that since there are three of us making good use of the Internet connection. But Dad will want a cheaper alternative when he’s the only one using the net and when he has to pay for it. :-) I looked at a couple of ADSL 2 and ADSL 2+ plans today, and it’s possible to save a fair bit if you don’t mind being capped after downloading 500MB or so in a month. I also checked to see what speeds we were currently getting on our cable modem. We seem to get 9.5Mbps from bmods.briscomp.org.au. Bigpond’s website says that you can experience download speeds of up to 5Mb per second, but we’re obviously getting more than this. I remember when we first had the cable installed the technician said that it’s possible we could get 10Mbps uncapped. Of course, this varies at any given moment depending upon how many other people in our area are using cable. Although ADSL 2 can theoretically reach speeds of 12Mbps and ADSL 2+ can reach twice that, you need to be living really close to the exchange to see speeds anything like that. So until I move out, we’re staying on cable. There’ve been hardly any problems with it so far.