I love cable. My cable service (Comcast in Mass) give 3 meg download, which is theoretically fantastic, but something like 384 upload. Since I run my own webserver this is less than ideal, but that's probably not a concern to you.
The 3 meg download is the absolute max - a single average user will rarely see it, since almost no website will send to them at 3 meg. It does make a difference if you have multiple users or if you like to multi-browse. When waiting for one message to load I might also be in another forum or another site. I have absolutely no patience, so I flip back and forth a lot.
To compare cable to a dial-up modem is not a comparison. Cable is much, much faster. On an *average* site you will probably get 500-1000 Mb/s download speed. Compare to a 56K modem and you're running 9-18 times faster. If you manage to hit an idle server with a very good connection to the Internet you may actually get 3 Mb/s, but that's very rare. On the other end if you try browsing at the same time everyone else on your cable segment is browsing then that 3 meg number will go down quite a bit.
But it's still going to be a hell of a lot faster than a dial-up modem. Personally I think it's worth every penny. But the Internet is my job, one of my hobbies, and I also run my own web server and mail server out of my house. I'm not average. In fact I spent about 1.5 years paying $129 a month for a 1.5 Mb/s DSL line. And I thought that was worth every penny, too.
I hate having to wait for pic's to download and when there are several, I quite often give up and go to another post. Some peoples pic's seem to load faster than others, I guess it is their server. Now the real question
