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OK. Comparing dial up and cable modem technology, it's safe to assume that the time taken for traffic to travel from your ISP to the game server is roughly the same, and varies between ISPs only in the quality of their interconnections (and bearing in mind that most ISPs offer broadband and dial-up, it will be the same for a given ISP).
Therefore we're looking at the speed your traffic can get from you to the ISP. On a CM, this takes place between your CM and your local UBR, at a distance of perhaps 5-10 miles. On a dial up line, this is between you and your ISP's modem racks, possibly at the other end of the country. Hence it's further for a start, but the real bugger is that the modulation/demodulation required to translate digital data into phone signals is slow and inefficient, and this happens twice. CM encoding just puts the digital data in a docsis header and does some checking, which is why it's slower than an Ethernet connection, but much faster than poor old dial up.
Compare your first-hop ping on dial up and CM.
Here on ADSL it's about 12ms, this being up the phone line digitally to the Home Gateway in Ilford, on the other side of London (20 miles). At the best, a CM will give you 9-15 ms, slowing a bit as the userbase expands in your area (but not too much, if we're on the ball).
Hence what I said originally about technological differences. CM tech is faster than dial up tech, irrespective of download speed. A 56k CM would ping much faster than a 56k dial up modem.
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