> but I am tired of 28.8 dialup. Once they run the cable to my > house, which I refused years ago, the radiation is there (If there still > is that issue), as even if they disconnect the service the coax still > can radiate.
Here are a couple of quick comments for you Patrick... I have had Charter for years here. I have their 26/3 meg package but most areas are getting rebuilt for the new top speed pf 60/5. I can get that here if I want it, but what I have is plenty fast. I don't have any noise issues here. But the plant is fairly new and it's tight. They have to fix any leaks, so suffering is not something that you have to do. I do have a few good contacts I can share with you off list. I have the local Plant Manager's direct telco line, and there are some top-notch ways to get the technicians and not the contractor-level guys involved in an on-line forum. If you go Charter, I can share that stuff with you off list. They have been great here. I had a few issues here over the years. One was when a neighbor had a new driveway put in, yeah you guessed it. They ignored the markings and nicked the buried trunk with some re-bar. But a quick call when things began acting up and I was getting noise and a few days later they direct bored in a new piece of underground trunk and installed it all pretty like. I wound up getting their HD package and a few more television sets, way too many actually, but they happily rewired my entire place for me, leak tested everything, ran a TDR on my drop, and then added a local amp as a pre- amp here at my demarc on the television side to serve up all of the sets. All for free. There were a few times that people began saturating the node here and speeds varied. A call and they rebalanced the nodes for traffic loading and added some additional incoming capacity, and boom. No more issues. I get the full speeds, plus the short time power boost way over that almost every time. As far as the speeds here, I am satisfied. And I am picky as heck. Now as to renting vs buy. Invariably, you will lose modems now and then unless you never get storms. I would have been way in the hole had I bought mine. If for no other reason than that they had upgraded the technology here. The latest one I have is Ubee DOCSIS 3 modem. This is the new name for Ambit modems. It has been stellar. I got it before channel bonding went active here, and even on a single channel it was a lot better than any of the modems I had before. Channel bonding (to 4 downstream channels) is active here now and the speed consistency is superb. For me, I wouldn't want the hassle of owning. I get new modems every year or so as they upgrade and make them better. If you rent, you just call in and they ship one to you in a box whenever something new is out. They special shipped me that new Ubee ahead of the general roll- out straight from St. Louis when I asked about it. Over and above service I would say. I don't get noise as I mentioned. But I run shielded CAT5 from the Ubee modem. That I use to run my local LAN here. I have an IP Cop dedicated firewall/router that I built from castoff PC parts here that handles the job of routing from the Internet to the LAN and also does firewall service. I have about zero invested in it. I built that in a good and well shielded case and used a very quiet PC power supply. The output of that feeds a metal cased Ethernet switch and Shielded CAT5 to all of the wired PCs, printers, etc. I have a dedicated wireless AP set to transparent bridge mode that allows secure WiFi access to my laptops too, with IP Cop handling the security and routing and the AP handling encryption only. Again, no noise issues here. Many of the consumer grade routers and WiFi access points I have used over the years have been quite noisy. But my home-brew and far better setup works well. One of the good things about the system upgrades Charter has been doing to add higher Internet speeds and telephone service is that they really have to tighten up the cable plant performance. Sloppy, leaky ,and mis-adjusted cable plants don't handle those services reliably. So you might want to see what services are available in your area. As to DSL, that is just too slow for me. And the farther from the CO you are the slower it is. We have some DSL here at a few of our sites and it is noisy as heck. Being far off the beaten path and with DSL providers trying to at least look like they offer broadband and not what is really near-broadband, they have been pushing faster DSL permutations. Often these have shorter service length limitations. So I'm not sure how feasible you getting it will be. I am 1/2 mile from a CO here and they can't justify upgrading it because cable Internet has so blown by them in speeds that no one wants DSL any more. Now FTTH is another story. But it's doubtful if I'll see that either for a good long while. Maybe it would be worth having the local Charter people call you and talk with them. If you want to follow up send me an email off-list and I can point you in a direction. I sure can't imagine them not killing the line if you dropped the service and were having noise issues. But you could ask your local people. All I can say is that with what I have here for cable and my local setup, I wouldn't want to be without my Charter service. My advice: Rent the modem. (Do not get their whole house router/modem combo as these are unreliable speed wise and noisy, and you can't manage them as flexibly), and add your own router or router/WiFi-AP or do what I did and make a better quieter router for free from a cast-off PC if you want to share that connection with all of the computers in your house. I hope that helps. Rick Kunath _______________________________________________ IRCA mailing list [email protected] http://montreal.kotalampi.com/mailman/listinfo/irca Opinions expressed in messages on this mailing list are those of the original contributors and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the IRCA, its editors, publishing staff, or officers For more information: http://www.ircaonline.org To Post a message: [email protected]
