While I would love to sit here and tell you that the @Home cable modem service is the answer to everyone's bandwidth problems, I simply can't. It's not the technology as the DSL advocates would have you believe, it's greed. I'll start from the beginning.

I've been an @Home subscriber for 2 years now. In that time I've received some of the fastest possible home internet speeds at the lowest possible price. The pricing plan I opted for gave me a 10 Megabit connection for $40 a month plus some additional taxes and fees. Of course it included a bunch of software that I already had, and they would sell me an ethernet card if I needed one (being a network engineer for 3 years, I had a few dozen sitting around the house and decided to save 50 dollars). And since I knew what I was doing for installation, I opted for the complete do-it-yourself package, which consisted of some guy driving to my house, dropping off the cable modem with a smirk and laughing "good luck" as he sped away.

Installation was a snap. Ethernet card in PCI slot... Windows 95 autodetect... network configuration (DHCP would have been a nice touch, but I can deal with entering my own IP address, Subnet mask and gateway every so often, especially since it gives me a static IP address, unlike modem connections which are constantly changing on you). Reboot... Surf at high speeds... what could be easier?

For 2 years, nothing but sublime happiness as I downloaded at an average of 100K/s (enough to get anything, regardless of size, in less time than you become bored changing the channels on TV). Unfortunately, in June of 1999, that changed.

One day I returned home to find my Cable light out (The motorolla cybersurfer, the cable modem itself, has a few diagnostic lights on it. PC tells you if your ethernet card is powered, Power tells you if the cable modem has power, and Cable tells you if there is a signal coming in from the cable line). Obviously nothing had changed on my end, so i figured there was an outage. I called the tech support line, which I had never needed before, and they told me that they had no record of an outage, but that I should give it some time and see if it came back.

Three days later, I still had no connection. I'll spare you the gory details and say that after a few techs came out to my house, it was determined that the neighborhood was oversubscribed and the cable didn't have enough power to service my house, being at the far end of the node. They boosted the signal, which worked for about 2 weeks, but again, the problem occurred. This process was repeated for about 5 months now. It shows no sign of improvement, and because I use the internet for work related materials, I've taken on an additional dialup ISP to ensure that my downtime is kept to a minimum.

The technical details of @Home are not at fault. Each node produces a broadband signal at 30Mb/s while each cable modem can send data to your computer at 10Mb/s (over ethernet). As a network consultant at Cornell University, our residential external connection was a T3 (45 Mb/s). It sustained 6000 connections at consistent high speeds. It's not the theoretical limitations imposed, it's simply over subscribing the service without breaking the nodes apart and reconfiguring the routing of data.

On the east coast, DSL isn't in full swing and is much slower than cable for a much higher price. Because of this, if you are really dying for high speed access, it's the only way to go. Unfortunately, it's not a perfect solution and seems to be getting worse with age.



Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 40