[TriLUG] broadband option in the Triangle area

[Rob Lockhart]

On Sat, 28 Aug 2004, Ben Pitzer wrote:

> Well, time to plug my service.  Time Warner Cable's Road Runner service in
> this area is very solid.  I work for Road Runner, so I can tell you that the
> network has been improved in the Triangle to a very high level of service.

Cool, I should say that I was pretty impressed with the service when I
first got it here back in November 1999 (beta-test!).  What a Christmas
present; 1.5Mbps from 52kbps dialup.  And that was after being in 
withdrawal from having CM in Austin.

I had the TW cablemodem service in Austin, TX and they had lots of
problems.  (I also helped design the cablemodem chips they were using
too).  Most of them were caused by 5% of the people using 95% of the
bandwidth.  It was uncapped, but that changed and most of the problems
went away.  I believe at the time, the real issue was upstream traffic and
people setting up file sharing were causing slowdowns for others due to
shared upstream channels.

However, since day 1 in Raleigh, I have never had any problems with RR.  
Very impressiv, IMHO.  I switched to EL, because they had dialup backup.  
Now I hear TW has this as well, but I'm not sure if it has national POPs
like EL.

> I'm a sysadmin for RR, and I check the list regularly.   I typically am
> willing to help out (time permitting) if the tech support folks aren't able
> to answer the questions or address the problems adequately, or if they won't
> escalate a problem you know isn't your machine.  I'll also gladly answer any
> questions that don't compromise the security of my network or my NDA (and
> thus my job).

Cool, I have some questions, that perhaps should be covered by some kind
of FAQ but I've never seen such technical questions answered.  I have a
UPS in my house, as the power (Duke) goes out frequently.  I'm also at the
end of the power grid, from what neighbors say.  I noticed that when the
power would go out (more than 10 minutes) in the neighborhood, both the
cable TV and cablemodem service were disrupted.  I was told by someone 
over the phone at TWC over a year ago that as of January 2003, there were 
going to be UPS's installed in the CMTS/HFC cabinets.  The power went out 
once for more than a few minutes, and sure enough I still had cable sync.  
I was wondering if there was some sort of specification for how long the 
CMTS cabinet UPS provides power.  Additionally, is there priority service 
provided for TWC voice service over the HFC for TWC cablemodem/voice 
customers, or is it all considered the same.  I am thinking Vonage or 
TWC's implementation here....

Additionally, I can probably guess that this is one of those NDA-type 
questions, but in Austin we were told by the General Manager (Steve 
Frisbee I believe) that they had 3 SONET rings in the city, upgradeable 
from OC-3 to OC-12 as the bandwidth dictates.  They also had about 13 CMTS 
units, and I think each could serve 1000 people.  I'm sure it's different 
now (that was pre-DOCSIS), too, but it just goes to prove to you that it's 
not your neighbor hogging your bandwidth that really matters; the 
bottleneck is almost always the backbone connection.

Something else I am surprised no one has mentioned regarding DSL versus
Cablemodem service.  DSL states 1.5Mbps for non-lite service, and 3Mbps
for their extreme version.  This is the link rate, not payload rate.  So
you have to consider ATM overhead (10%) and AAL5 / RFC2684 (?)
implementation overhead as well.  If you get DSL, don't be surprised if
you do not get 1.5Mbps.  More than likely you'll max out at about 1.3Mbps,
and that's assuming you're not being served from an IMA-based 8x DS1
connection to the remote ASAM in your neighborhood ("net hogs" can
saturate those connections).

My coworker recently got DSL and was complaining about apparently getting 
1.5Mbps according to the DSL modem webpage but only 1.2-1.3Mbps data rate 
during downloads.  I had to explain the above phenomenon to him.  I still 
cannot understand why BS charges more for less, though; even as compared 
to similar service by the other RBOCs / ILECs like Verizon and SBC.

Regards,
Rob