Cable is probably the leader in most markets in the US. DSL hasn’t been given the same innovation love, so in markets where it is still marketed (primarily by AT&T) the speeds are almost always lower/capped at 50Mbps down. In more rural areas DSL still has a stronger foothold. But in general, yes, cable is quite prevalent.
I haven’t seen DSL at more than 2-3mbps down even around the biggest US cities. The only real high bandwidth download option is cable (coaxial), and the only high bandwidth download and upload is fiber.
AT&T markets a hybrid DSL technology under their UVerse brand name. They run FTTN (fiber to the node), then split from the node via standard DSL, albeit at much closer distances (and hence much higher speeds). This product can provide "DSL" in the 50-200Mb/s range (currently), but it is not the regular DSL that most people associate with the technology.
From what I gather, FTTN itself illustrates the bootstrap problem the US market faces in that in some cases they should have fiber already run to the nodes decades previously, but didn't until the early days of DSL. US Telecoms are nothing if not procrastinators on infrastructure upgrades.
The irony though is that if you are building FTTN new as much of AT&T has been doing the last decade and a half, it's not that much harder to at the same time push all the extra few dozen feet into the Home for FTTH, which Verizon figured out years back and AT&T only finally got a clue much more recently.
(AT&T also hurts their case by charging basically the exact same prices for bad POTS DSL and FTTN DSL, despite the huge variance in speeds, and tend to be not entirely forthright about which option is serviced to a particular address, leaving a lot of US consumers with an overall distrust of DSL.)
Part of the reason the telecoms in the US were slow to upgrade was that they were originally forced to do local loop unbundling. Why invest if competitors could use those lines for cheap rates?
And the cable companies already had a high bandwidth (at least for ~2000) transmission line to most houses in America.
Notably, Verizon tried with FIOS, but it wasn't that profitable. Most people stuck with cable internet, even if it was slower.
This is exactly my experience as well. In DSL's favor I would add that it's not a shared pipe and the latency is generally low and very very consistent. If it were 20-30mbps down DSL would be competitive again. Emotionally I'd like to ditch both the phone and cable providers, they and their exploitive business model suck fetid dingo kidneys.
My current ILEC "offers" 100 Mbit DSL, but you have to be within a certain distance of their main infrastructure (I forget what it's called. DMARC, maybe?)
This means it offers 100 Mbit service, but at my house it actually maxes out at 8 Mbit.
I dunno. The latency would have to be really really really low (like single digit ms) for me to even consider it.
My cable is 220mbit down/17.5mbit up (actual measured values).
CenturyLink sells me 100Mb at about half of what cable would cost.
It’s also true that a requirement when buying our house was “less than a mile from the CO”. More recently (like ~ 10 years ago) they put a DSLAM 2 blocks from my house.
Although fiber is available nearby (and further from the CO), they’re not going to wire our neighborhood anytime soon.
