BeigeJournal

My crappy Internet service provider, Athenet, has finally ticked me off enough to send me enthusiastically to my local cable broadband vendor, Time Warner. For a long time, of course, I’ve wanted high speed Internet at home. First I had to wait for it to actually be available, and then there were the many horror stories of non-working service from the early-adopters. I don’t use Windows, which is all anyone claims to support, and when I asked some time back if Time Warner would install the service without Windows present, on the understanding that I’d be on my own as far as configuring the computer, they didn’t bother to answer me. Dial-up is cheaper, of course, and it was working, and I do get to play with high speed Internet at work.

The thing that finally pushed me over the edge wasn’t the low speed of the dial-up connection once it was finally working. It was having to not just wait for the modem to dial and negotiate with the ISP’s modem, and then wait for the computers to negotiate the PPP connection, but then have that negotiation more often than not fail, time out (eventually) and then wait for another cycle of dialing and, usually, timing out, and then the connection would frequently hang up after a minute or so, just when I was starting to actually finally do something. Then there would be another cycle of dialing and timing out and redialing, and then maybe yet another hang up. Eventually, after enough tries, I’d get one that works, and it would stay up for hours and work just like it should have on the first try. I’ll also note that I’ve never been able to relay mail through their mail relay, and have wasted countless hours trying different sendmail configuration settings, assuming that it must be something I was doing wrong, but when I bought web hosting service and tried using their mail relay, it worked perfectly on the first try. Guess it was another Athenet problem.

I stopped by the Time Warner kiosk-thingie at Mayfair Mall to order Internet service and I picked up the self-install kit there. I stopped by Radio Shack to buy some 75-ohm coax, connected the coax, through the provided splitter, to the cable modem, connected the modem and computer with the provided cat-5 cable, plugged in the power brick, told my computer to use DHCP, and everything should then just work. It’s that simple. Time Warner should advertise that it is this simple. They don’t tell you anything about how the process of getting the service connected goes, they don’t say anything about the self-install kit, they don’t tell you that all you need on the computer end is 100 Base T and DHCP (they don’t seem to document that the system uses DHCP at all), and basically they make it sound hard. It is really easy. Arguably, it is easier than getting dial-up to work. They ought to advertise this fact. They also ought to improve their documentation overall. I have no idea how to get the e-mail configured, though since I’m using my hosting service’s e-mail that’s not a big priority for me. The self-install kit comes with nothing printed at all. There is a reasonably helpful PDF about the cable modem on the included CD-ROM, but no information whatsoever on configuring the computer, even though all you really need is the magic “word” DHCP. They do have the necessary server names (mail, news, etc.) on their web site, but you’re on your own to find them.

In my case, actually, it didn’t just work. After dragging the cable box into the computer room to check that my new cable was OK, I called their main number, was promptly connected to someone who verified that the modem wasn’t quite talking to the system right, and who discovered, after a few minutes of investigation at her end, that they never removed the entry for my old analog cable TV box from their system when I upgraded to digital cable and somehow the system was confusing my new cable modem with the database entry for the old analog box. Once she fixed that, everything just worked.

You remember that TV ad for satellite television, in which, the moment the installer gets the dish connected, the homeowner runs out of the house shouting about how amazing the satellite television is? That’s pretty much how I felt once the helpful technician fixed their end. The cable modem lights came on like they should, I clicked the “activate” button on the network settings program, fired up the web browser, and dang, this thing is fast!

It’s around two orders of magnitude faster than the modem. I certainly haven’t done any extensive testing yet, but I’ve seen sustained speeds of around 350 kilobytes per second in wget. Graphics-intensive web pages come up faster than I can look at them. Nexrad weather radar loops are rather more practical than they used to be. It is much too soon to say anything about reliability, but it certainly is nice to have a connection that is just on and doesn’t take 10 minutes and a zillion redials to start working. I checked a few weather web sites this morning, which I normally never do because I don’t have time in the morning to re-re-re-dial.