Northstar Broadband
             Your Cable Television and Highspeed Internet Provider
Toll Free: 1-800-572-0902                     

Bandwidth and Speed:

When it comes to bandwidth and speed, cable broadband is the one who wins the battle. Cable is capable of offering a speed that is almost 2 times faster than ADSL. However cable services can slow down if too many people are accessing the internet at the same time in the same region. With ADSL this is not the issue, even if you and your neighbour are using the internet at the same time, it does not considerably affect your browsing speed. Nonetheless, the speed and bandwidth battle is always won by the Cable Broadband.
Installation:
This is the next important factor to be considered when a type of broadband service is to be taken. With cable service all you need to do is call the cable technician to get a new line installed. Next you just need to connect this line to your modem; it is as easy as plugging your VCR to the television.
Theoretical vs Real times:
So many factors go into real transfer times that it is very difficult to wrap blanket numbers around them.  Once you get over ISDN speeds, network latency, protocol overhead, driver efficiency, and all kinds of other technical things get in the way.  In general, expect transfer speeds of 40 to 80% of the maximum speed.
About the Analog-Digital Transition; and problems that Exist.
The digital transition wasn't created a couple of years ago. It's been scheduled for over a decade. Yet, manufacturers still produced analog televisions as late as 2006.  Back then the transition was scheduled for 2006 - changed to the 2009 date after the FCC realized that the nation wasn't ready. Stores are now required to put a sticker on analog TVs letting people know about the transition. That would've been nice to do a few years ago before people spent their hard-earned money on an analog TV.


Aspect Ratios:

The problem is that high definition video has a 16:9 aspect ratio. All other TV programming is 4:3, which is the square-like image that we’ve watched most of our lives.

The problem is that HDTVs are 16:9, so a 4:3 image will either have black bars on the sides of the screen or the image will stretch to fill the entire screen. Black bars on the side of a screen is one thing but getting used to a distorted image is difficult, especially when you expect your digital TV to display a better image than your analog TV.


Analog Signals Absent in Digital Boxes:
The problem is that many of the digital converter boxes offered by the NTIA's coupon program do not receive analog signals. This is an issue because low-power or Class A stations will continue in analog after February 17, 2009.

For example, if you live in a city that has a low-power station and you use a digital converter box that doesn't pickup analog then you will lose access to that signal unless you disconnect the box and plug the antenna going directly into the TV.
Test your Internet connection speed at Speedtest.net