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Which Cable Modem Service? 23

Posted by Cliff from the picking-the-best-deal dept.
Carcass asks: "This has probably already been discussed to death but: Which cable modem service provider would you choose: @home or Adelphia powerlink? I have these two choices right now and I need network connectivity. Experienced opinions are welcome."
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Which Cable Modem Service? More

Which Cable Modem Service?

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  • It was announced a while back that SNET will be doing testing of DSL service in Hartford, New Haven, and, I think, half a dozen other cities in the state of Connecticut in anticipation of a wide-scale rollout next year. Visit their site (www.snet.net? .com? I forget.) and see if you qualify for DSL testing.

    I'm in Milford, which isn't one of the cities that's lucky enough to get tested, but we have cable modems here (through Cablevision), so it's all good.

    - A.P.
    --


    "One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

  • The fact is that the morons at Podunk Cable, Inc. typically won't be messing with your cable modem service, thank god. I've had Century@Home from Century cable & @Home for over five months now with only two periods of extended downtime - and this comes from a company whose cable offering is arguably the worst in the industry. It's a miracle in itself that Century even still has a franchise what with the numerous illegal rate hikes they've tried to perpetrate on their subscribers in recent years. Your ISP (@Home, RR) leases the lines from the cable company but that's it. There are still a million different ways an imcompetent maintenace man can thrash your entire city's internet service, but all that bureacracy and waste that you've come to know and love from your cable company shouldn't transfer over into your internet service. Of course, @Home is considered by some to be just as bad as they cable company :)

  • Egad! Sorry I didn't see this sooner. I've had Adelphia's PowerLink for one year now. My local service is one-way (uses phone modem for uplink) but they use the General Instrument SURFboard 1000 cable modem which has had a very good Linux driver for some time (Hi, Franco! Where are you??? :^)

    At first I was totally pleased and stoked about their service. I got >60kB/sec download speeds routinely, and as high as 110kB/sec. That blows away the local DSL competition, which is 256kbits/sec bidirectional. They do have "no server" rules, but to me that's no big whoop FWIW. I mean, this is a one-way cable modem, and I personally understand where they're coming from with this rule. BTW, you get your own web site on home.adelphia.net when you sign up so you don't need to run your home box as a web server!

    However, my local office seems to be getting very oversubscribed now. I'm talking to some local networking experts about this and their current consensus is that the T-1s are probably saturating, even though Adelphia *swears* on a stack that they aren't. Too many subscribers, not enough bandwidth, and they don't seem to be adding more T-1s either. Generally the evening download rates are only 10kB/sec. Heck, my phone modem can almost do that.

    So, I have no experience with @home, but it all depends on how big a pipe they have to the 'net versus the number of local subscribers. I guess other issues like congestion on your neighborhood coax and headend/router problems could also figure in, YMMV.

    P.S.: I'd like to be able to contact you directly but I didn't see an e-mail address/link on this Ask Slashdot article.

  • Face the facts: no matter how bad a service is, you will live with it.

    I have had a cable modem in Canada (with 'rogers'@Home) for just under 6 months. I have a few friends who have had the service for over two years.

    I could bitch away at all the bad things that happened, from the first day when the lady on the phone asked if I had an IBM or a Mac, and I said PC (this went on for about 5 minutes).

    The bottom line is when you are dealing in with unmotivated workers, things are going to suck. I bet it is pretty hard to be motivated when you are installing a cable modem for some obnoxious teenager who is mocking you all the time because you don't know that dos linux thing.

    I would have to say that despite the major outages and the lack of communication between me and my ISP, things have been pretty decent. Just recently I started to get 300k/s downloads on a regular basis.

    The only people I know who have had problems with their cable modems are the ones who run a win32 variety directly connected to the modem. Even when the modem is smoking and dropping packets, unix gateways seem to be able to atleast get the packets out (that is talk to other boxes, rather than constantly time out).

    Cable isn't mission critical; you will have to deal with outages, and you will be pretty pissed when you have to wait on the phone for 2 hours to find out what is wrong, but be grateful for the pseudo leased line you are getting.

    Now then, I can't tell you which ISP to select, but remember that everyone is going to tell you their horror stories. You are probably better off to probe into each ISP and ask them about how they do their routing and what type of hardware they are using. You may hit a security through obscurity barrier, but keep pushing.

    Tis all for now.
  • First: Think REALLY hard before you decide you want cable modem service. Cable companies are legendary for incompetence.

    Second: I've never had cable internet, so no useful advice there. BUT I used to have adelphia cable TV, and boy are they bad. I've seen how bad they are at their core business, the idea that they're in cable internet now scares me a lot.

    YMMV.

    ----
    We all take pink lemonade for granted.

  • I've had a cable modem for about 6 months now with MediaOne (who just got bought out by AT&T)

    It works pretty well most of the time. There have been at least a couple outages (6+ hours) in the time I've had it. That's not such a big deal for me, because I've kept my regular ISP account too.

    It's certainly great for games (if you play Half-Life:TFC you may occasionaly encounter me as 'Boomer'). That extra 50 ms does make a difference.

  • @Home offers cable internet over most of Connecticut, including (I believe) New Haven. They just hooked up West Hartford. Free installation, www.tci.net
  • I had Adelphia Powerlink a year ago, and it sucked. I'll admit I had the Hybrid modem (cable downstream, analog upstream), but the service was very shoddy. I would get very regular outages, speed wasn't much better from a dial-up, and they'd disconnect me every so often. My @Home is much better. Yes, I'll get outages everyonce in awhile, the mail server has a tendancy to go down alot. But they have no problems with me running linux; they openly give out all info(Gateway, IP, netmask, etc... on the website). But warning, I think they do require you to have Winblows installed to setup service. I was lucky, I had a nice tech who knew of linux, but he wouldn't even let me hook my hub up to the cable when he was there; he could only plug the cable from the modem to my box. I was on my own from there... But other then that, I'm very happy with my service. And you can't beat the price. When DSL's get alittle more widespread and the prices drop, I'll probably switch. But it just doesn't compare with cable at this point.

  • Adelphia (Score:1)

    by nd ( 20186 )
    I think I would recommend Adelphia over @home. I don't know this from experience, but I've heard so many bad things about @home, not to mention their upload capacity limit. That alone is enough reason to go with Adelphia if it doesn't have the upstream cap limit.

    Another point is that service varies from area to area. For example, here in Minnesota people have been generally very unhappy with the cable modem service from MediaOne - yet in other areas people have been thrilled with MediaOne. Check on things such as static IP/hostnames, their policies on running daemons, if it's 1-way or 2-way service, and what kind of cable modems they use (external with ethernet hookup is probably best, and both probably use that).
  • As a Twin Cities MediaOne user myself, I totally agree.

    I'm on my 3rd cable modem. The first two sb1200's they gave me kept having problems, so I'm using the internal sb1000 now (working much better). But you're right, 1-way hybrid is awful.
  • I have to agree on the kudos to MediaOne. I'm a subscriber in the Twin Cities, and other than a scheduling snafu to get it installed, it's been great.
  • Since a few weeks I'm with @Home in The Netherlands. I don't know how my service compares to the @Home service in the US. Here servers are officially not allowed, but according to their webpages they do not actively check, and will only react to complaints. So I don't think I'll be getting into trouble with my private ssh server.

    What's weird is that all incoming connections reach my computer except for telnet. Any ideas why telnet is blocked but ftp/http is not?
  • They're a bit retentive about not being able to install their software on your computer and see it work before they leave...

    The flip side is US West. They closed my DSL installation order without my signoff. Or a physical check at my junction box. Or hell, even bothering to tell me -- I would see the WAN LINK on my DSL modem, right?!

    Wrong. They screwed up the order and I did *not* have DSL service. But the last, and nearly the only, communication I had from them was that my order was delayed due to lack of equipment. So I "had" DSL service for two months before I flaked out and canceled it, right?! (That's why I have to file a formal complaint with the PUC, so the records will show that I waited three months before cancelling the order for nonperformance, not that Linux users are flaky and technically incompetent.)
  • Unfortunately I've no experience with Adelphia, but I can at least give you a few details about @home (excite@home?).

    I had the service for approx. 2 years in Southern California and for the most part was quite satisfied. My setup consisted of a proxy/masquerade machine serving 2 clients.

    Service in general:
    Downstream performance was excellent for the most part: bandwidth averaged about 110B/sec, with ranges from 40KB/sec to as much as 300KB/sec. There were a couple of periods when the 40KB/sec prevailed, I assume because of traffic load. They were quite responsive to bandwidth concerns, usually acting (by upgrading their equipment) in a matter of weeks.
    Upstream performance was adequate. Nothing to get excited about but it worked. I ran a Shoutcast server, web server, and FTP server so I had many opportunities to test the performance. The upstream average was 24KB/sec with ranges from as low as 12KB/sec to as much as 48KB/sec. I understand they've talked about instituting programs to curtail upstream usage, but I'm not aware of their beaurocratic or technical success in this area.

    Hardware:
    The cablebox is of the Motorola CyberSurfr variety, a bit larger than a VHS videocassette. It's got a 10BaseT out (perhaps a serial out, but I might be confusing it with the RCN Hybrid cablemodem I have now). It's not TCNS (new-ish cable modem standard) so I didn't purchase mine outright and would recommend the same to you. It runs a bit warm, though I didn't have any heat related problems. I've got friends that hide it in a closet with a hub and masquerade server and have also experienced no problems.

    Networking details:
    Here's the stickler and worth checking into your local @home provider to get more details about: @home's changing to DHCP assigned IP addresses. Not only this but if the machine you've got connected is Win98/NT/2k/whatever based (god forbid!) they'll force you to give it a hostname of their choosing and have it join their WinNT domain. Frightening! The DHCP issues not a firm one. Mine was staticlly assigned and others have specifically requested and received same. This is probably a region by region issue.

    Installation:
    They send out 2 guys; one for cable and another for computer work. They know that people use masquerade, etc. to share the connection and they don't seem to mind. In fact during my installation they joked and told anecdotes about other installations where it was obvious the connection was going to be shared (i.e. installed in closets, etc.). They're a bit retentive about not being able to install their software on your computer and see it work before they leave, so just let them do it. When they're gone, remove it (it's just a tailored version of netscape and realplayer) and set things up however you like as it's just a plain IP connection. They'll try to tell you how great their web-proxy is (cached pages, etc.) but it's of course not necessary to set your browser to use it. Oh, one other thing: supply your own network card (NIC) and have it working before they get there. If you use the one they supply they'll hit you up for $50 and it's just a crappy ISA NE2000 card. Not to mention they get to monkey around in your computer's case. Which we all know is sacred territory.

    I've got a 1.1Mbit SDSL connection now and while I'm happy with it, you can't beat the cablemodem's value.
  • ... and when you come in, though. I signed on with M1 when they were still "Highway One", while I was living in Watertown. Back then there was hardly anyone on my node and I was getting 120-200k downloads from a decent server. When I downloaded the Myth demo when it was first available (a 40mb file) I did it in less than 10 min.

    When I was in that town, since it was one of the first to have access, they were getting the newest upgrades and well maintained lines. Now I live in Arlington, and I may have to cancel my M1 account until they make some changes. The set up in this town is really new but they just loaded it up with members, so download speeds and browsing is about the same as a 33.6. The other day I downloaded a system update from one of Apple's servers and the best I got was 4k. I mean, even when Apple's FTP site is way overloaded I used to get better speeds than that.

    For $50 a month, 4-10k download is really not worth it.

    Other than that, I have really liked my cable access with M1. Some of their tech people are about as sharp as a marble, but the few times that I have had to deal with them they have been polite and take care of things well.


  • Hey, I'm living in New Haven, CT and as far as I can tell there is no residential broadband - cable or DSL anywhere. Anyone out there know of a good resource or (even better) a company that provides service in my area?

    Thanks
  • You're the first person in St. Paul I've met in any capacity that has been happy with MediaOne hybrid access. 33.6 upload speed is absolutely pathetic, and the fact that it requires a phone line to work doesn't help either. People can complain about @Home's upload throttling, but they're not getting a bad deal, especially for the money they pay. It's definitely better than analog!

    They might have fixed it somewhere in the TC Metro, but nowhere that I've heard about...
    --
  • In my area (Perth, Australia) you can't get any cable access at all. The ONLY telco who has owns lines is called "Telstra" they are real bigots. Recently i rang up aqquiring about cable access and the guy who answered my call simply said- "Sorry sir, Their isn't any cable access in Perth and probably never will be" and then tried too sell me normal 56k access. Also they provide shocking over-priced service. They are only required too provide 28.8k line speeds. I wish I could move too somewhere with cable access. I would kill for it. (seriously).
  • In my area (in america anyway, cable modem access in germany, lol!) we have Charter Communications (formerly marcus). Here, Charter contracted one of the local networking firms to create and manage the cable(modem) network. From that knowledge I would gather that the quality of your service (at least with charter) will depend on your area. Luckily for me, the company put in a good system. In another city charter may not contract as good of a company, and therefore the service could suck.

    -----
  • In my area, TCI cable has a strict "no servers" policy that I would technically be violating, even though I have no plans to have a huge public server. This was a key factor in my decision to go with DSL. Before you buy, make sure you won't be violating their policies. It would be quite a hassle if they decided you were too much trouble and shut you off for something as silly as running an ssh server for your personal use. --Sandy

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