I got cable before the dirt was dry over the trench. Its been a mixed bag,
TCI is
the provider, but they use AT&T for content and Sprint for the backbone. When
I first got it, it was like having my own T1 for $40 per month. As they added
more and more people, they began throttling the rates to fit more slots, and
now limit uploads to 128K.
Their first line support sucks, and follows a script which takes an average of
45 minutes to go through. (Run WINIPCFG, check you IP, check you modem,
are the lights on, etc). Its still a lot better than dialup, but not what
it should
be.
You can't put a server on the line, several have tried and they've been kicked
off. They also forbid you to tunnel, although I occasionally do. Instead of
tunneling through the $40 cable, they want you to buy @work, which is
much, much more per month. They continue to add customers on the line
until it become a crisis, only then after repeated threats do they seem to
acquire more bandwidth. YMMV, of course.
At 03:04 PM 3/1/00 -0800, Mike Ford wrote:
In the meantime
I have RCN ringing the doorbell every week for cable,
broadband and phone... I hold little interest in cable modem as I can
see that loading up and getting bogged down.
I think that issue is obvious, so obvious that it isn't a problem. I know
dozens of people on various cable systems, some for more than a couple
years, and it just hasn't happened to any of them ever. Plenty of other
things are a bit of a PITA, but 200k bytes per second both ways is hard to
walk away from at $39.95 a month.
--Steve Mastrianni