Originally Posted by buckwheat

That's right - it's distance and copper quality to the DSLAM (switch), usually not located at the CO but remoted out on the street somewhere and backhauled via fiber.

I keep 4 (four) ISPs, Cable, DSL, Sat and Sprint Wireless. All 4 are about $120/mo. I had two T1s before they just became ancient cash soaks so I dropped them both.

I failover both the Cable and DSL as a group to the Sat, but have found aggregation is almost impossible trying to use two ISPs bandwidth into one. All this can be fairly easily done with equipment like Cisco 3640s, had on Ebay for a small fee.

Interestingly DSL is by far the most reliable of the bunch. Cable is about 3x faster, but is up and down like a yoyo. Sat is, well just Sat. Sprint's good while on the road or in a pinch