Cable Modem Installation
Background:
It was clearly time to get a higher-speed
home internet connection.
In the three-and-a-half years since I had
arrived at Berkeley, the average throughput I was getting from
home through the dial-up lines attached to U.C. Berkeley's faculty
modem pool had declined from an average of about 18,000 bits-per-second
to about 8,000 bits-per-second--and that was not counting the
increasingly-common experience of having to put my modem on auto-redial
for half an hour to get connected at all. Increasing congestion--modem
purchases and maintenance not keeping up with demand--was taking
its toll. (And this was the level of service in the (privileged)
faculty modem pool: when I asked my graduate students what things
were like in the non-faculty home-IP model pools, they assured
me that I really did not want to know.)
This level of service began to feel more and
more unacceptable. In part this was because of relative-service-speed
considerations: while my Berkeley dial-up connection was falling
in average throughput from about 18,000 to about 8,000 bits-per-second,
my wife's AOL account was increasing in average throughput from
about 4,000 bits-per-second (when she could log on at all) to
a fairly reliable 36,000 bits-per-second or more. In part this
was because of the increased availability of truly high-speed
connections: both TCI Athome and Pacific Bell (and other DSL
providers) were promising sustained 1,000,000 bit-per-second
connections. In part this was because of the increasingly-large
amount of interesting stuff on the internet.
The standard response of Berkeley departments
to the... slow... speed at which home-IP pool capacity was increasing
was the standard one of exit: run your own modem pool accessible
to people in your department. My department set up a very nice
group of 56,000 (OK, 53,000) bit-per-second modems. But my main
machine was still my Apple Powerbook. And Apple Powerbook modems
are flaky and finicky: for some reason that Apple could not explain
to me, my connections to the department's modems were very fragile.
It was--counting disconnects--better than home-IP, but not by
much.
So my choices were simple: (a) live frustrated
and envious of those with higher-speed home connections, (b)
get a main home computer that would have a more reliable and
more robust modem connection than the Apple Powerbook, or (c)
go for a truly high-speed internet connection.
Market Research:
"You are going to have to go with TCI
and a cable modem," he said. "We're beyond the range
for DSL--even our DSL. So the phone company just isn't an option."
"He" was Salvatore D'Auria, the
father of one of my nine-year-old's friends. He also was a very
senior executive of Tut Systems,
Inc. (net income last year, approx. -$10 million; current
stock market capitalization, approx $500 million), which:
...designs, develops and markets advanced communications products
which enable high-speed data access over the copper infrastructure
of telephone companies, as well as the copper telephone wires
in homes, businesses and other buildings. These products
incorporate Tut's proprietary FastCopper technology in a cost-effective,
scalable and easy-to-deploy solution to exploit the underutilized
bandwidth of copper telephone wires. The Company's products
include Expresso high bandwidth access multiplexers, associated
modems and routers, XL Ethernet extension products and integrated
network management software. Tut's award winning HomeRun
technology, an in-home application of FastCopper, has been chosen
by the Home Phoneline Networking Alliance (HomePNA) as the initial
specification for in-home networking over phonelines.
This means that he should know.
But I called up both Pacific Bell, asking
about a DSL connection, and TCI, asking about a cable modem connection.
Pacific Bell said that they would call back
in less than 24 hours to tell me if DSL would work on my home
phone number.
Pacific Bell called me back the following
day to say that the answer was "maybe," that they were
referring the question to the engineers, and that I would hear
within three business days.
Pacific Bell called me back six business days
later--on the phone line that I wanted DSL installed on--to say
that they had lost the phone number that I wanted tested for
DSL.
I decided that even if DSL was possible, I
surely didn't want it through Pacific Bell. The organizational
incompetence quotient was just too large, and in the meantime
TCI has called me back with a time, a date, and a price for an
Athome cable modem connection. The date was soon, the time was
convenient, and the price was $100 for installation; $39 for
ISP service, cable modem (i.e., router) rental, and connectivity;
and an extra $10 for two additional IP numbers so that all three
of the computers at home could transparently access the internet.
Installation:
When 3:30 on June 23, 1999 rolled around,
the TCI truck showed up.
They discovered that cable signal at the house
was too weak to support a modem at all. Another truck was called
to install an amplifier three-tenths of a mile away to boost
the signal. This was successful: the signal was then very strong.
They discovered that the cable I wanted the
cable modem in was one of the few rooms in the house without
a cable connection. I pointed out that there was a cable
connection directly beneath where I wanted the modem--eight feet
straight down on the floor below. They said that they were cable
guys, not electriciants. They were not equipped to hook onto
the first floor cable and pull another drop eight feet up through
the wall. So over the next two hours they climbed 30-foot ladders,
explored routes, made false starts, and in the end strung a hundred
extra feet of cable under the house and up behind downspouts
to get the cable into the study.
The cable modem then came out of the box.
It was plugged into the power strip, it was plugged into the
cable connection, it was plugged into the little four-port ethernet
hub that is the core of our home four-foot-in-diameter tiny area
network. Nothing happened. I reached out and punched the "uplink"
button on the hub. The hardware installation was then complete
and successful. But it was clearly a hardware installation done
by cable guys--not by electricians.
The configuration information datasheet then
came out of the box. The ethernet and TCP/IP control panels on
the Acer were configured to look to the ethernet for TCPIP, to
look for a DHCP server, and were told the addresses to tell the
DHCP server. Pings pinged. The system software configuration
was then complete and successful.
The Athome software installation disk then
came out of its box. Athome's special versions of Microsoft Internet
Explorer (and Outlook) were installed on the Acer. The newly-launched
Microsoft Internet Explorer loaded a brief "welcome to Athome"
page and then successfully loaded that Athome home page itself.
But it loaded the Athome home page into a newly-spawned Explorer
window, instead of loading it into the first-launched Explorer
window.
We poked around, discovered that everything
seemed to work. It did seem as though Explorer was spending a
lot of time spawning new windows when it should be loading pages
into old windows. But we agreed to ignore this strange misconfiguration
and to declare that the application software on the Acer had
been successful.
Software Problems:
The cable guys then left, saying that I would
have to deal with the Member Services page on Athome in order
to get my two additional DHCP configurations for the two Macs
in the study. I sat down to do so, and ten minutes later had
two additional DHCP configurations to load onto the Macs.
Athome's CD-ROM declared that on the Mac it
worked only with Netscape Commmunicator, so I began to "upgrade"
Netscape 4.6 to the Athome version of Netscape 4.5. By force
I stopped the software installation disk from overwriting Quicktime
4 with Quicktime 3. And the computer reported that the software
had installed correctly.
But...
When we launched Mac Netscape, it loaded not
the Athome home page, but instead my home page http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/
at Berkeley. "Hmmm..." I thought. I poked around and
discovered that installation hadn't overridden my earlier Netscape
4.6 preferences. I changed the preferred launch page to http://www/
and restarted. Now it showed nothing. I poked around some more
and discovered that installation hadn't configured Netscape to
use Athome's proxy server. I configured the proxy and again it
showed nothing--but this time I couldn't even see my Berkeley
home page.
I unconfigured the proxy and surfed the net,
getting average throughput speeds of more than 500,000 bits per
second. So I shrugged my shoulders--after all, why should I care
about my ability to reach Athome's private version of AOL's home
page?--and was happy.
Later on I reconfigured Athome's proxy, quit
Netscape, tried to launch Athome's home page on the Mac, and
poked around to see what was going on. I discovered that javascripts
from their home page were crashing.
So I wrote to TCI technical support:
...when loading *your* home page: http://www/
on the Mac, I get a newly-spawned blank browser window and the
Javascript error message:
>JavaScript Error: >http://www/V3/spawnindex.htm,
line 693:
>syntax error.
> = 0405) &&
>.................^
>
>(window.top.navigator.appVersion.indexOf("Mac")
>== -1) ) {
>JavaScript Error: >http://www/V3/spawnindex.htm, line
3504:
>
>isIE4 is not defined.
I received back:
>Brad,
>
>Thank you for writing TCI@Home.
>In reference to your question about >javascript. We need
some additional
>information to assist you. What browser are >you using
on the Mac is it
>the Netscape Navigator, or is it Internet >Explorer.
>
>For further information, please write us >back, or contact
our Customer
>Satisfaction Center...
This gave me a sinking feeling: Microsoft
Internet Explorer is not supposed to work on the Mac for Athome:
there is only one browser you can install from the CD-ROM. Does
technical support not know this? I sent back and e-mail stating
that I was using Netscape. And never heard from them again.
Software problems continued. Athome would
go down. Athome would be very slow. They would reconfigure their
DHCP server so that my machines would get different TCP/IP addresses:
this broke all of the shortcuts in my little home area network.
I counterattacked by switching my TCP/IP addresses so that I
manually entered the original addresses I had been given.
And over time the software did not seem to
improve...
Hardware Problems:
But I didn't hear back from them before the
cable modem died.
Ten days into the cable modem experience--the
evening of Saturday, July 3--it went dead: no power lights at
all. "Gee. This is going to do remarkable things to Motorola's
mean-time-between-failures..." I thought.
If it had been my cable modem, I would have
called up whoever I had bought it from, gotten an RMA number,
ordered another, and sat back to wait for a new cable modem to
arrive the morning of Monday, July 5.
But it wasn't my cable modem: I was renting
it from Athome. They offered to send a technician out to confirm
that the modem was dead and to bring a replacement the following
Wednesday, July 7. I told them that that wouldn't work--I had
to be in San Francisco all day on Wednesday. They offered Thursday
afternoon: a time some 78 hours later than if I had been handling
tech support myself.
And it took a lot longer to negotiate with
TCI tech support than it would have taken to get an RMA number
from a mail-order company...
More Hardware Problems:
And over time the quality of response of TCI--now
AT&T Internet--declined. Hardware problems appeared and corrected
themselves.
By March of 2000 it took 190 hours from my
report of trouble to the first appearance of a technician--and
the problem was not fixed. A work order had been issued, and
the work might be done before the weekend, but it might
not.
And be this time I had reached the conclusion
that cable modems were a second-class form of broadband internet
service. The problem was not the cable itself--the cable is a
wonderful high-throughput high-bandwidth device. The problem
was that AT&T Internet is made up of cable guys, while its
DSL competitors are people who work for the phone company. The
phone company tries hard to fix problems: its ideal is that its
service is always-on: you should never lose dialtone.
By contrast the cable guys think, as one AT&T
cable supervisor said, that they are doing a much more than acceptable
job if the roll a truck 48 hours after they have confirmed that
there is indeed a problem in your strand of cable.
Thus the cable modem people are going to lose,
and are going to lose big: they cannot develop a culture of service
to match the local phone companies, and at a price point of less
than $50 a month they are going to get stomped.
Excuse me, I have to call up AT&T Internet
and yell at somebody in an attempt not to get billed for the
time the cable modem has been offline...
The traffic map is taken from Telegeography: http://www.telegeography.com/
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