[ale] Cable Modem

[Alexander Barton]

Bao Ha wrote:
> Have anybody on the list had experience with cable modem?
> Adelphia?  I am currently in Boca Raton, Fl, and cable
> modem seems to be more readily available than ADSL.
> 
> Thanks.
> Bao

I have Comcast's @home service.  It's a hell of a lot faster than my old
28.8K modem.  They didn't promise me a static IP address, but I'm always
at cc850159-a.chmbl1.ga.home.com just the same.  It was fun to impress
my fellow geeks and dog-lovers alike at work by FTPing into my home
machine and downloading pictures of the family pet that the parents
emailed me. :)

They guys who installed the cable were fairly accomodating.  "Can you
run the line down this side of the yard and drill a hole in this brick
wall right _here_ and connect to the coax you'll find on the other
side...."

I haven't used @home's email service (abarton at home.com), preferring to
stay with my "permanent address" $15/month Mindspring account.  (I don't
need @home email, don't want other @home "services", please don't sell
my name to other folks or try to sell me stuff, just give me bandwidth
thank you.)

On the other hand....

They insisted on removing Netscape from Windows95 and installing their
own "@home-ified" version of Netscape with @home logos everywhere.  They
even replaced Netscape's animated "N" with a red "@".  This was
unnecessary and unexpected.  But I'm only ever in Windows to play games
anyway.

I was going to say: That round-trip latencies used to be on the order of
a significant fraction of a second when telnetting to work.  That it
often took 15 hops just to get a packet outside of the @home network. 
(If I'm going across town to ftp.cc.gatech.edu, why does my packet need
to pass through Tenessee and Washington, DC, on the way?)

But, I'm not going to say that.  I just did a tracroute to Tech and it's
down to just five hops to get out of @home and as far as I can tell, it
doesn't leave town.  Woohoo.

Being connected 24-by-7 is nice.  It was nice to set up a web server to
serve HTML from a Window's CDROM which Linux could read but my folk's
Mac couldn't.  Here Mom, point your browser at this address. :)  It's
mildly entertaining to watch the script kiddies probe my firewall.

Enough.  I digress.  To summarize:  I'm satisfied with my service of the
last 18 months.  No significant outages to report.  The cost is about
$45 a month after a $150 installation.  (Doesn't mean that I trust
either Comcast or @home, though.)

-- 
Alexander Barton         "...Unix doesn't have a monopoly on good ideas,
abarton at mindspring.com    it just owns most of them." -Alan Cox
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