Having been onboard with both cable modem and DSL from the outset (and finding the former to be faster in many situations), let's look at the numbers.
If you're doing well with either, assuming you're paying for the fairly standard "$50/month" packages, on a good night you might see 400Kbps for your download speed. That's 400K bits, or 50K Bytes, per second. So, in one minute you'll download, if you're lucky, 50K * 60 or 3 MB. So, after only 150 minutes (2.5 hours), you'll have your 450 MB download. Now, that's orders of magnitude better than you'd see with dialup, but there's going to be lots of times you won't see even 400 Kbps. Happens to me all the time and depends on a lot of factors, many of which you have no control whatsoever over.
I don't know a whole lot of people who are really going to wait a couple of hours to download a game, and for most people it would be much, much, slower. Then again, it's been a while since anyone would consider me a hardcore gamer ...
Ron Boerger
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