ScottC is right (as usual - but not always ). It really depends on your particular providers and in rare cases your particular application. One is not intrinsically "better" or more reliable than the other. Cable here on Long Island is mostly fiber from what I understand and very fast. At least under some conditions it will run at something like 10 mbs from what I have seen. In other areas it may not be as fast. Ours has been very reliable and pretty good customer service. Also reasonably priced. However, I think another difference is that DSL will allow you to have a static IP address which at least with our cable service is not possible. For me that doesnt matter. However, I have a friend/co-worker that has written several computer and internet books for O'Reilly and some other publishers and he does some hosting relating to this that requires DSL. For just surfing either will work. I would ask around in your area and find how satisfied people are with the service and value with each provider. Unfortunately, I dont think those of us not in your local area can help too much.

ScottC is correct. Unless either your cable/telco system is unreliable (goes out frequently) there is going to be no noticable difference. Let other parts of the service offerings make your decision for you. These include price and features.

One thing to be aware of that providers like Verizon do in parts of the US is force you to use their mail servers with email addresses at their domain. I don't think many providers do this in the US...

Is the norm now, yes there is an authentication process which wasn't there before, but I haven't heard of a providor who won't let you send mail even with the proper authentication. It can be tricky to setup, but once done, works fine. I must send from a half dozen accounts, all differant, through differant providors, DSL, Cable, T1, dialup, wifi, all work fine across all connections - granted, with proper SMTP authentication setup.

Sorry to have gotten off-topic. Gaucho, my Castillano is just about at the level where I can ask for directions but never quite understand the answer, but I've taken it out for a ride. From what I've been able to read, unless you actually have noticed a problem with microcortes, I would be very, very skeptical of any claim that 256 ADSL will be the equivalent of 512 cable because of their riddance--the complaint I've mostly been able to discern is interference with peer-to-peer applications. I've used CyberTel delivered over Multicanal infrastructure, and in fact the only thing that didn't work well was trying to gather all the pieces of "3 Feet High and Rising" for a friend.

This said, the price-to-performance curve in Buenos Aires does seem to be quite steep, so much so that if you want to have two machines or applications using bandwidth simultaneously, multihoming may be a reasonable option. There is a BsAs blogger/journalist, Fernando Cassia, who has written about this. The most recent article I've found is here, but one should be able to drill backward one by one. I hope this is of interest.