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Way
back when in the midevil days of computing (before the Internet),
I was a loyal
CompuServe fan. While I really liked the CompuServe forums, I
didn't like how it took them
forever to upgrade the Danbury POP (point of presence) to higher
modem speeds. Thus I began
my search for a better dial-up connection. I still wanted to
use CompuServe. I just wanted to use
it and the Internet faster. So I looked for a local ISP (Internet
service provider) that would
provide the fastest dialup connection available at the time,
probably 28.8 or 33.6 kbps.
I started with Internet 84. Remember
those guys? John and Nick were on the early edge of the
Internet revolution well at least in Danbury. Like a good local
ISP, they were responsive to
questions, helpful on the phone, willing to give extra services
(like the small block of static IP
addresses I once had), and way over worked.
After a year or so they sold their
business to another company that was building a state-wide
service. I hope they did well because they earned it. Unfortunately
the new company did not
provide the little extras or the support that John and Nick had.
So low and behold, I found
another local ISP, East Coast Internet. ECI had just changed
hands and had a special offer for
DACS members. By the time I signed up, they had changed the name
to Mags Net.
When high speed or broad band Internet
access first became available in Connecticut, I wanted a
connection as soon as I could get one, regardless of how it worked.
The two options were (and
still are) cable modem service from the cable company (Charter Communications in my case) or
DSL service from SNET (now SBC)
or one of many CLECs (competitive local exchange
carriers) that advertised in the state. Even when SNET did begin
to offer DSL, it was not
available in New Milford. Some time after SBC bought SNET, DSL
became more widely
available in Connecticut. SBC has a web page where you can check
to see if DSL is available on
a specific phone number. I checked the option to have them notify
me when I could get the DSL
and forgot about it.
Meanwhile Charter Communications
upgraded their cable network to support digital services.
This was during the mid- to late-nineties during the "tech
boom" when many people (including
Bill Gates) thought the "Information Superhighway"
would come into homes via a box
connected to your television. It took them several years to start
offering cable modem service and
it took several more years for the service to get to New Milford.
In June of 2000, I finally got a
cable modem.
Now I would have preferred to get
my broad band service from Mags
Net but a proposal to force
cable carriers to allow competitive access to their wires (as
had been done with the local phone
companies), was never enacted. Thus most cable companies have
a monopoly within their
service area. Despite the monopoly, I was delighted with the
faster speeds and proceeded to wire
my house with local area network outlets.
Cable versus DSL the showdown
Remember I said I checked an option
on the SBC/SNET web site to be notified when DSL
became available? Can you imagine my surprise when that worked!?
Well you could have blown
me over with a feather. The very day I received that email, I
called Patty at Mags Net to start the
process of installing DSL service. When I realized that I would
need to buy a DSL modem, I
checked eBay
and bought one for about $30 about one quarter the cost of a
new one. Since the
phone company does the actual work of turning on the DSL service
(they route it to Mags Net
from the telephone company central office) it should not come
as a surprise that I had the DSL
modem from eBay a good two weeks before I could use the DSL service.
So now I have both DSL and cable
modem service in the house at the same time well for a
month or two. So how do they compare? Thought you'd never ask.
Installation
Charter was easy
Of course Charter was easy, when
I got cable modem service in June, 2000, the technicians did
everything, self-service installation was not even an option.
The process took two appointments.
First a guy came to run a new length of coax - special low-loss
coax - from the box outside
directly to the computer. Since I wanted the cable modem in the
basement, this job was easy.
Then two more technicians arrived to do the actual installation
and set up. My plan was to move
the network servers from my office to the basement but all that
was not quite ready, so I had the
technicians install the cable modem to a single machine I set
up in the basement.
A few days later I had an electrician
install new electrical outlets in the basement and in my
home office. He also pulled an ethernet cable (CAT-5) between
the office and the basement.
Once this was complete I could move the servers out of the office
and down to the basement.
Generally there are two or three machines running in the basement
depending on what projects
are active at the moment.
These days I understand that most
of the cable companies charge for installation but offer a
"customer install kit" if you want to try it yourself.
I would suggest that you try the self-install
because there is very little to go wrong with a cable modem.
DSL is often "non-trivial"
Hey, I'm a networking professional,
right? This DSL stuff should be a snap. My actual
experience has varied from absolute agony to perfectly simple.
With DSL there is more to do.
Since DSL adds a new signal to your phone line, it is necessary
to put filters on all of the regular
analog devices on the same phone line. That includes the FAX
machine, and your old computer
modem. Without the filter, you will hear an annoying "hash"
in the background whenever you
are on the phone. With the filters properly installed, the phone
line is clear. Some people have
reported problems with their DSL connection if any device on
the line is not filtered.
My first experience installing DSL
was pretty bad. The cause was not SNET but the customer's
office phone system and wiring. They have a very installed multi-line
office phone system.
Naturally when I hooked up the DSL modem, nothing worked. At
that time (pre-SBC-SNET
merger) the phone support was pretty bad until you got to the
second level engineers. When
discussing the situation with the support people I began to realize
that the multi-line system
would be impossible to filter properly, so we asked SNET to move
the DSL service to another
line in the office with just one phone. After another two weeks
for SNET to process the change,
the DSL modem worked and we had everything going in short order.
The agony was the process
of figuring out what wasn't working, where and why. Just to increase
the degree of difficulty,
there was total confusion over the customer's user ID and password.
SNET had sent two
packages with different passwords. The confusion would make a
good Keystone Cops movie.
The customer's local area network (LAN) was also new. A simple
hardware router completed the
installation and allows two computers to share the DSL connection
to the Internet.
My next experience was actually
quite good. Chuck Fizer and I installed DSL service in his
office in Danbury with Mags Net as the provider. The service
became available on the day SBC
said it would and the networking really was a snap. Of course,
the network had been up and
running for years. All we did was add a hardware router to the
network, set it to the correct IP
addresses and it all "just worked". We did find that
it was difficult to filter a two-line phone
because most DSL filters only filter the inner pair of conductors
on the phone plug. A special
two-line filter from Radio
Shack solved the problem.
So now we get to the installation
at my house and all sorts of new problems. In all honesty, many
of the problems were my own making. My home office network has
been up and working for
years so that was not an issue. When I connected the DSL modem,
it was obvious that there was
a signal but the modem would not "sync" with the signal.
Mags Net could find nothing wrong on
their end, so they submitted a trouble report with SBC/SNET.
While waiting for the technician, I
started to research the problem on my own. My first stop was
the Broadband Reports web site
(dslreports.com) where I searched for the Westell 36R516 modem.
On one of the message boards
I saw several references to the fact that a slightly different
signal standard is used by some DSL
carriers on the West coast. Several references talked about the
"VPI/VCI settings" which, it turns
out, are internal settings programmed into the modem at the factory.
Normally there is no need to
ever change them because your modem is supplied by the carrier
and they make sure it is
configured correctly by the factory. Of course, given my interest
in saving money, I skipped this
step and bought a used modem on eBay.
A couple of days later a technician
came to the house. After he trimmed a couple of wires in the
box on the outside of the house and the modem still did not work,
he pronounced my DSL
modem to be defective. According to his meter, the DSL signal
was strong and capable of the
proscribed speeds in both directions. I had to agree the modem
was the logical suspect.
Since I already owned the DSL modem, this was troubling news,
to say the least. When I
mentioned the VPI/VCI settings to the technician, he told me
that, yes, this could be a problem.
A few months earlier SBC here in Connecticut had received a batch
of modems that were
intended for SBC in California. Rather than send these "problem"
modems out to the left coast,
SBC gave the technicians a utility to run on the PC that "fixed"
the modems, one by one as they
were found in the field! Now I was almost certain that this was
my problem so I headed for the
Westell web site and, at first I could not find anything to change
the settings that I was now
convinced were the problem. One of my mottos is, "When all
else fails, read the directions."
Taking this to heart I read the FAQ (frequently asked questions)
on the Westell web site and
there as I live and breathe was a reference to VPI/VCI settings
and a very well hidden link to
download a configuration utility. Of course I really had no idea
what I was doing, but then again I
had nothing to lose. So I started to experiment and was really
disappointed when changing the
basic settings did not fix the problem. Then in a stroke of luck,
I noticed that the utility would
also update the modem firmware. Once again, with nothing to lose,
I applied the newer firmware.
Still no good, but with my brain beginning to actually work,
I put all the settings back to the
original values (it pays to take notes when you do stuff like
this), and wha da ya know! It
worked! So the problem was the modem firmware, not the settings.
Performance
DSL versus Cable
As now I have both DSL and cable
working side by side on my network. My intention was to run
some benchmark tests to settle the question of which is faster.
Unfortunately (or fortunately,
depending on how you look at it) while all this was going on,
Charter chose this moment in time
to increase the speed of my connection from 768Kbps to 2Mbps
on the downstream side or three
times the speed of the DSL line. According to the letter from
Charter, this is a "free four month
trial". In reality, it's a marketing ploy to keep people
from switching to a less expensive DSL
connection. Given the disparity in the rated connection speeds,
testing pure download speed
would not be fair. In normal everyday usage, there is almost
no difference. But as soon as you
download a large file, the faster connection is, well, visibly
faster.
The less visible factors
So why would I want the slower Mags
Net connection? Flexibility. The standard service from
Mags Net uses a static IP address (one that does not change when
you connect to the service). All
of the other services cable modem and SBC DSL use DHCP to assign
the IP address
dynamically whenever you connect. A static IP address and some
of those intangible little extras
let me run my own email server and a web server. While it is
possible to run a web site on a cable
(I did it for over a year), it requires some tricky setups using
third-party DNS (domain name
service) and other "fancy stuff". It is flat out impossible
to receive email on an SMTP (simple
mail transport protocol) server connected via standard cable
service. You need a static IP address
to receive email plus DNS pointing to your server.
So that's the current status. I'll
pull the plug on the cable modem in another week or so. Anyone
want to buy a slightly used cable modem?
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