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November 30, 1998

Cable Modem Conundrums Part III: Arrival

By Jason Levitt

n a town where nearly everyone either is a musician, was a musician, or is going to be a musician, my cable modem was installed in about 15 minutes by, you guessed it, a musician. A local jazz saxophonist, working as a lineman for Time Warner in Austin, Texas, installed my cable modem quickly and painlessly, which is the way it should be for consumer Internet connectivity.

Most of the 15 minutes spent installing my new Time Warner "Road Runner" cable modem connection involved configuring the client software and attaching a small box to the outside of my house to split the cable modem wire from my cable TV connection. The procedure was hassle-free, and resulted in an impressive Internet connection that has boosted the performance of my virtual private network connection (see story) back to the CMP Media enterprise network. The cable modem connection has been solid, and is considerably peppier than my existing dual ISDN connection.

By the way, my ISDN connection has caused numerous headaches. Just being on the switched telephone network means that every time the telephone company technicians open up the local switch boxes to fix someone's phone line, I'm in danger of going down. There is also the annoying duality of having Southwestern Bell manage the physical connection, but having an Internet service provider to provide Internet access. Thus, every time there is some problem with the connection, I often have to call both companies to resolve the problem. Time Warner has its own issues with Road Runner; but there is, at least, a certain comfort knowing that there is only one company I have to contact to get the service issues resolved.

Cable: Good and Bad
Time Warner, @Home, TCI, and the other companies that have cable franchises in U.S. cities are well-positioned to become preeminent providers of Internet connectivity for the small office/home office in their various markets. Time Warner already had the fleet of maintenance trucks and the billing (my monthly cable modem bill appears on my cable TV statement) in place. Providing the cable modem service meant laying a hybrid fiber coaxial network to link the existing coaxial systems with a fiber-optic cable back end that eliminates many of the performance and maintenance issues associated with metal coaxial systems. On the downside, the upgrade is a slow and costly process.

My main quibbles with Time Warner are their use of dynamic IP allocation instead of using static IP addressing, and their high prices for their so-called "business class" access (actually, in Austin, Road Runner cable modem service is not yet available to businesses and isn't expected until mid 1999). I outlined those complaints in Part I of this series. In Part II, I confessed that, despite my protestations in Part I, I was definitely going to get a cable modem connection from them as soon as it's available. And I erred by saying that @Home users don't get static IP addressing. Apparently, they do, at least in some areas. @Home seems to be similar to Time Warner in the way it lets its local cable outlets decide on pricing and access. So, the price for cable modem access in Austin, Texas, may be different than, say, San Diego.

Cheap and Fast
I'm bullish on cable modems. Though I still don't think Road Runner is a power-user solution (as I mentioned in Part I), the price is right and so are the specs. My installation cost was $79.95, though it's somewhat higher if you need an Ethernet card or modifications to your house. The monthly cost for the cable modem service is a flat $44.95, which includes rental of a Motorola CyberSurfr Wave Modem. This is a great deal since you wouldn't want to buy the cable modem box yourself--they're coming out with faster ones every year. The $44.95 is for one machine, but you can add others to your cable modem LAN for $14.95 per month per machine. The Motorola cable modem is a router so you can attach a hub to it to add more machines to your LAN.

The connection is fast, though I haven't run any benchmarks on it yet for which I trust the results. The modem itself is rated at 10 Mbps downstream (from the Internet to the user) and 1.536 Mbps upstream (from the user to the Internet). My perception is that the connection performs at least three times faster than my dual ISDN connection, which theoretically does 128 Kbps.

New Software
In Austin, Time Warner is deploying the new Road Runner version 2.0 client software, which has addressed many of the shortcomings of the previous versions. Those shortcomings included automatically launching the user's Web browser and displaying the Road Runner home page every time you connected to the service, forcing the user to manually reconnect (no auto-login) at startup, and having to keep the login program running on your taskbar in order to keep the connection. Figures 1 and 2 below show the new options screen and the pop-up menu for managing the connection. These are significant improvements over previous versions of the Road Runner client software, and obviate the need for the many custom login programs floating around. The one area for which custom login programs are still needed is to support operating systems besides MacOS and Windows, which are the only ones the Road Runner client software supports. Programs are out there for Linux, as well as other platforms.

Image 1.

Image 2.

The State Of Connectivity
For business users, xDSL (Digital Subscriber Line) still has advantages over cable modems, especially when considering upstream bandwidth, flexibility, and maturity of products. However, in Austin, there are many areas of the city, including my own, where xDSL is not yet available. Meanwhile, cable modems offer a big, persistent, inexpensive pipe, which is great for operating a VPN back to your enterprise LAN. And it's available now.

Note: I was hoping to write this column about getting AppleTalk to work over our VPN at CMP Media, but the folks at Bay Networks, from whom we bought our Extranet Switch, have decided not to support AppleTalk. Thus, we must search elsewhere for AppleTalk support on our VPN. If you have any ideas, send me some E-mail.

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