When I Was Your Age (tm), a 2400 baud modem was an amazing device. It was SEVERAL times faster than the 300 baud I had used in my apple II, which let me download FROGGER and SPIES DEMISE from the local area BBS's (that's bulletin board system, and if anyone here knows/remembers what one is, *FEEL OLD*) at amazing speeds!

Of course, then came the 14.400 (I never did have a 9600...) and then the 24k, then the 28.8, 33.6, and at last the 56k modems... I still have my 300 baud somewhere....

Anyways, enough nostalgia. The point behind it, is people allways want more speed in communications, particularly when it comes to the internet.

You have 3 basic choices out there right now. Dialup at 56k, DSL at 256k, or CableModem at (Random).

I've been fortunite enough to have service with all of the above,plus a few that not many people have heard about. (Satalite, anyone?)

The first one I got to "experience" was DSL, through USwest communications (now Qwest). and what an experience it was. It was lots faster than the 56k, but... it only worked at night.

You see, the phone lines USwest used in the area, weren't exactly up to snuff, and during the daytime, sunlight would heat up the lines (!) and cause the DSL service to not fuction. After trying to deal with USwest customer serivce, and being put on hold (then disconnected) several times, I simply drove down to their building in downtown denver (the corporate office) and left the router at the front desk with my name and phone number. Fastest callback I ever did get. :)

They "Allowed" me out of the 1 year contract (which is something you typically have to sign with any DSL deals. If you don't like it, tough, you're stuck with it. for a year.)

The next one I tried was through a satalite dish (using a 33.6k modem for upstream). Download speed was great, but I wound up having to pay an insane bill for it (you can only DL a certain amount of data per month).

About that time, I was looking for a semi-decent job around the denver area, while waiting for something else to come along. I took a job with TCI CableVision with their brand-new product, @Home.

At that time, I had sworn I'd never try a cablemodem, because of all the things I had read about the early test programs (Shared bandwidth, essentially a LAN connection, someone could packet-sniff a password from you, etc, etc, etc...)

I took the job because, quite frankly, it paid *WELL*. I started out on the service side, because of my expertise with macintosh computers. (I was one of the only macintosh familiar people at the call center, and boy, was I busy.)

After awhile of learning how it worked, and watching them update the system and actually go out and re-build things that didn't work right (albeit slowly) It eventually evolved into a system where shared bandwidth wasn't a true concearn - there was more bandwidth per node than could really be used. (A "Node" is, in english, an internet server that lives on your block. Your cablemodem, and all of your neighbors, connect to the node, which has a fiber optic line that strings back to the NOC - network operations center. Mind you, this is over-simplified, but it gives a general idea of how it works)

Not only that, but they had set the routers up so that individual computers could see each other, but not communicate directly, nor have access to read the packets going to/from the other machines. How they did this, I have no idea, but I'm sure that the people at Cisco who built the routers are involved in black magic of some sort.

So, I decided to try it myself, to see what it was like.

Now, growing up in colorado, we had Jones Intercable for years, and loved it. Then, years ago, TCI essentually bought out Jones in our area, and overnight (quite literally, we tape-recorded the switchover) quality of signal and reliability dropped like a *ROCK*. it was horrible. Absolutely horrible.

I expected the cablemodem's reliability to be the same.

In fact, it was so bad, I never even got to try it.

They took my neighborhood "Offline" because it just had too many problems and they didn't feel like fixing it at the time.

Months passed, and I got news that floored me. TCI was being bought out.
by AT&T.

I was floored for two reasons: #1, I felt like I was living in a dilbert universe. #2, STOCK SPLIT! :D

About that time, I moved to Aurora (innexpensive appartment... Remind me to write a review on why home security systems are neccicary...and a few on 12 guage shotguns for home defense...) to be closer to the call center, as I was driving a Jeep, and the commute was a real killer.

Aurora was one of the "Upgraded" areas, where they had physically gone in and ripped out all of the old cable, and replaced it with brand new fiber optics. The newspaper stories at the time were something akin to "They're using them poor folk to test their unreliable junk, and leaving the rich folk alone". Sounded like typical corprorate stuff to me.

Well, I found out that Yep, I'm servicable for @home. So, in a span of 3 days, I had TV and @home hooked up. (For free, mind you, <GRIN>)

The first thing that shocked me was the quality of the digital cable signal. Nowhere near the ghosty fuzzy image I remember of TCI, the closest thing to this I'd ever seen was my friend's DSS satalite system. Impressed me.

Then I got the cablemodem. Installation was a snap, but, then again, I knew exactly what needed to be done, and the techs are allways (at least, on the outside) friendly to the call center pukes.

I hopped on line and immediately hit all the speed test charts I could think of. Yep, it was faster, but I wasn't exactly blown away. Not dissapointed though, mind you.

Then one of the other techs told me about a nifty little patch you could run. Essentially, the windows registry has a few strings on how to send/receive data, and it's optimized for a regular dialup modem. I'll spare you all the gory details, but the patch optimizes it for the cable connection. I rebooted, and hit the speed test page.

When it told me I was running faster than a T3 line, I think I passed out or something.

I went to a site to DL a large file (MP3, about 2 mb. this was before napster folks.) to see what the actual download speed was, but it finished too quickly for me to see what speed it was actually hitting.
Eventually I did work out that I was getting an honest 200KB per second. KiloBYTES. that translates into roughly 1600 kiloBITS per second. DSL is 256 kiloBITS per second. (not bytes).
256k VS 1600k. Hrm....

Anyways. It worked. quite well. However, for reasons I'm still entirely unsure of, some areas work better than others, and it honestly doesn't seem to be connected to how many people are online at once. I'm fairly certain it has something to do with the cabling or layout. *shrug*

Anyways, here I am with my spiffy new cablemodem. I had made a point to leave the dialup modem *IN*, so I could make sure that I had a backup for when the cable went out.

Only problem was, in the space of 3 months, the cable never went out. (at least, not that I ever noticed, and I'm a dedicated net geek)

I eventually tore the modem out, and never went back.

I had @home for approximately a year and a half, and I can count on my fingers how many times it was down, (7), and for what reasons (usually severe storms that had taken power out as well. a few times for DNS server problems, but those were allways back up within the hour.) 7 times in approximately 500 days, for a total peroid of about 28 hours overall. Not too shabby.

The speed never really went down either, even as more people got on.

The only real problems I had with it, was... heh. TECH SUPPORT! (and I was one of THEM too!)

I got my fair share of both ends. Most of the calls in were very pleasent experiences from a customer standpoint, the techs knew what they were doing, knew what needed to be done, and knew that the customer (thats me folks!) wanted it back up and running because quite frankly they have no life and would rather whine and complain on the telephone than go outside and enjoy the beautifull sunshine.

Then there were the couple of times I had to be shot up to Tier 2. (usually by T1's who just followed the book instead of taking initiative in the problem.)

Now, when I started, we had our own Tier 2 personell in the colorado call center. That was taken away from us and farmed out to @home in california, due to the contract we had with them. (corporate decision. "We're paying them to do this, so they might as well do it". didn't think about the impact it would have on customer service).

Now, I don't know what it is about california, but every time I call into a call center out there for any product, I get absolutely mind-boggling HORRID service. Whenever I would call in for @home tech support (Tier one) I'd allways make sure to ask what call center they were in. If they said california, I'd ask them to transfer me to another call center (Yes, they did have that capability. When they told me they couldn't do that, I took perverse pleasure in explaining step by step, how they could. I can be evil, too).

Unfortunitly, Tier 2 was *ONLY* in California. And they were absolutely rude and unprofessional. I tape recorded both calls for use in training at our own call center (the first time, I wanted to hear how one of the "Upper Techs" handles a problem).
I wrap up with the teir 1 girl (who was very pleasent) and get transfered up. Hold music for a few seconds, then ringing. 5 rings later it picks up. Pretty danged spiffy.

Then.


"Yeh, what'yda want?" said in a "I'm too busy for you" voice.

*blink*

what the heck was *THAT*?

"Umn, is this tier 2 technical suppo-" he cuts me off. "Yes, this is tier two, whats your problem?"

"Well, I can't seem to ping the DNS server. I've got the IP written down, and there's no response. I can hit other sites (had a few web sites that didn't have a DNS name, just their static IP adresses, written down.) but no hits to the DN-" he cuts me off again.

"Have you reinstalled windows yet?"

Oh come ON. YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME. I've just diagnosed the problem, there's obviously nothing wrong with the OS, it's a simple problem of the DNS server being offline. The T1 even told me there had been 5 calls allready about the same DNS server going down just 15 minutes before.

"no, but I dont think it's windo-"

"Look, I'm the technician here, I'm highly trained, and the problem is with your windows system. You need to reformat and reinstall."

(yeh, he cut me off again.)

At this point, I was getting annoyed. Profanity ensues, and many talks about internal operations of AT&T @home are said, with him eventually telling me he's going to report me to his manager to get me fired, and with me letting him know the entire call was taped. "For training purposes".

I never did hear what happened with the fine chap, he never even gave me his name. (which is a major policy at @home, if you get cought not using your name, you get a 0 on your QA score for that month. big no-no.)

The second one went something like that, but not anywhere near as bad. Just a tech who sounded bored, angry, and hurried.

As I was leaving AT&T, they were bringing T2 back into the local call centers, and there was talk about AT&T not picking up @home's contract again once it expires. After all, AT&T has their own content and competent technicians, they don't need @homes. @home on the other hand, Needs AT&T, which provides it with most of it's market share.

So as an overall score, for Speed, it gets a 10 out of 10.
For Reliability, it gets a 9.5 out of 10.
for customer service, (T1) it gets a 9 out of 10.
For Technical service (T2) it gets a whopping 2 out of 10, though this number is rising from what my friends who still have @home tell me.

At this point, Tier 2 isn't really needed anyways. allmost 100% of the problems are solved either by sending a truck out to your place to replace a fried modem that your cat spilled it's beer on (funniest story I ever heard on the floor) or it's by a T1 support person sending in a ticket to the NOC.

The other, most noted, benefit, is that, in complete POLAR OPPOSITES to what DSL does (1 year required contract), @home will usually give you the first month *FREE*, and lets you cancel at any time, for any reason. They'll even be kind enough to send a truck out to pick up the equiptment so you don't have to drive down to the cable office.

30 days free, Cancel anytime, no strings attached. Honest. I've even had cases where we just couldn't solve a problem on someone's neighborhood, so we refunded them the money for the time they were down after they cancelled. (he was such a nice guy, too, very pleasent on the phone.)

For $40/mo, which is essentially the price of the ISP ($20) and a spare, Ultra-high-speed telephone line, ($20) and the ability to stay online without getting kicked off (CoughAOLCough) while jabbering on the telephone, and the 30 day free, quit anytime ploy,

There Really Is No Reason *NOT* To Try It.

If you don't like it, Send it back. If you don't feel like it, have them come out and bring it back for you. :)




Oh, and as a sidebar: Try to be nice to customer support personal, at *ANY* service/company you call. You never know, their last call might have been from a lady asking if they could fax the pope to her. (don't ask.)





Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 39.95