I've generally though of the phone companies as more corrupt then the cable companies. Here in Austin, I'm paying Time Warner $35 a month for 8mbit service. And quite often I use this, like my download of an ISO off MSDN last night was running at 800k/s. I think the best DSL in the area is around 3mbit, for more then what I pay. Reliability has been acceptable, with 2 short outages since I have used it starting in April.

I really feel that if the cable companies hadn't decided to get into broadband, we would be lucky to even have 128k internet service. Especially after the phone companies stole $200 billion under the guise of nationwide broadband rollout charges.