[TriLUG] OT: Check your cable modems! TW wont tell you to trade up.

[Charles Mangin]

not long ago, i noticed that all of my bittorre... er.. "large  
downloads" were getting hung up after a while, killing my entire  
connection. when this happened, i had to reset the router to get back  
online. getting openoffice and fedora ISOs became a very tedious  
process.  i figured it was TW filtering or killing off downloads like  
comcast was a while back, and just being nasty and aggressive about it.

so i switched my ISP to earthlink - with the benefit that my bill was  
slightly less per month than TW, but with the same speeds at the time.  
and i didn't have to swap out any equipment, since earthlink does  
everything over TW's copper.

all was well until, even using earthlink's network, another download  
died and my connection died with it. so i called earthlink to ask  
about the "outage". they suggested that i replace the modem TW had  
given me five years before with a new one. the big beige surboard was  
replaced with a small black one, and *poof!* my network problems were  
gone.

needless to say, i had called and asked TW about these problems  
before, and their suggestions ranged from my computer being  
unsupported (i was connecting via a fedora box, acting as my firewall  
at the time) to the cable in my townhouse being split too many times,  
and that i'd just have to live with it.

so... moral of the story is this: don't bother asking. if you have an  
older model modem, take it in to be replaced.


Charles Mangin
Option8, LLC - Making Macs happy since 1999.
option8 at option8.com | http://www.option8consulting.com
mobile: 919.368.7167
skype: option8llc