Ok, here's my information for all that its worth. I work for Time Warner (now
Bright House Networks) and was in the RR support group for 1 1/2 years to the
day, until I took a position in IT in Clearwater (still for TW/BHN). While
there is saturation of bandwidth at times, there are certain caveats that are in
place to ensure our customers get what they pay for (hopefully) and I can
explain at least a few of the differences and why it seems slower sometimes.
First, lets go into a little detail about the cable modem network. Its actually
quite remarkable and I have seen first-hand one of the big hubsites in Pinellas.
There is a lot of work that goes into keeping things going and there are times
that there will be downtime and outages due to the inherent nature and design of
the cable network. There will be system upgrades on both the HUB's (which
connect the cable aspect of the lines) and the Routers (Cisco chassis for the
data side). That is where you may at some times experience a downside to the
system but the upsides far outweigh, IMHO, those.
Lets talk shared bandwidth...
Everyone says that its such a bad thing that your bandwidth is shared and this
is not exactly true. There is a lot of bandwidth on the network to share and if
it looks like one router is getting overloaded then we setup an order for
another one to be installed and turn on some more of the tons of dark fiber we
have sitting around. If only certain cards on the router are being overtaxed
then it will require what is called a recombine where they redistribute the
connections to the cards so that there is an even load accross them all. These
are what cause some downtimes as well as IP address changes in various areas. I
believe the Tampabay affiliate is either one of, or the largest one in the US as
far as cable modem access goes so there are a lot of router upgrades,
maintenance, recombines and installations that happen almost on a monthly basis.
Here is where the shared bandwith comes in your favor though! With RR High
Speed you are supposed to receive a minimum of 150KB/sec (notice the big B, not
the little b) at any given time of the day accross the TW/BHN network. This
measurement is taken from our test site at test.tampabay.rr.com which is a
server located in our NOC. The reason we take the measurement to the NOC is
because thats the only bandwidth we can guarantee, after the NOC you are on the
Internet backbone.
Understand that the 150KB/sec is a minumum and you should be receiving that. If
you are not, please call the RR helpdesk and let them know:
# Hillsborough: 813-316-2626
# Pinellas: 727-324-1009
# Manatee: 941-345-1019
# Lakeland: 863-327-1009
# New Port Richey: 727-326-1022
# All other areas not supported by the above numbers: 888-577-9005
Now, the 150KB/sec is the <keyword> "MINIMUM" speed you should get. The nice
thing about shared bandwidth is that you can have more when its available which
means there are times that you can get 180, 200, 220 and up to 300K sometimes
depending on network usage. You don't pay for that extra bandwidth, you just
get it if its available. If you get DSL, you get exactly what you pay for and
no more/less from my understanding. This to me is pretty cool.
Now about why it seems slow sometimes...
When AOL merged with TW, AOL was the controlling company and therefore dictated
policy and procedures on how things were to go. The did not dictate what could
be done with other ISP's or business interests but they could control where our
money went and what we purchased as a business unit. For some of you who have
noticed, the backbone provider switched about a year or so ago to ATDN.NET. To
my understanding this is AOL's backbone provider or it may even actually be
owned by AOL as I have heard. This backbone provider had different routing
tables that took us up the Eastern side of the US before handing off to some
routers. What this basically meant was that if you were to ping your neighbor
next door who is connected with Earthlink.net through analog modem or DSL, your
ping packet could possibly go up to NY and back before hitting him based upon
the routing. Due to the switch to the new backbone and sometimes heavy
congestion, it slowed down responses from some sites at times and therefore made
it seemed as if RR was going slow. In all honesty, the connection to the NOC
was probably blazingly fast but once we hit the backbone, there could have been
issues sometimes.
No network is perfect and this is a very generalized overview of just personal
experience on the inside working with some of our field techs as well as with
the call center. I would like to state that I am biased towards my cable modem
and have never experienced a DSL connection. I am not biased because I work for
the company, just because I have enjoyed the product. I may have chosen poor or
inaccurate wording on some of my explanations and please feel free to pick apart
this post and correct me if need be (just please be gentle :).
Oh, and as for the differences between business and residential:
Residential users get:
- 24/7 connection with a guranteed minimum of 150KB/sec download speeds accross
the network.
- 24/7 free tech support
- Cable modem provided and if anything happens (ex:lighting takes it out) its
replaced.
- 5 Email accounts, each with a 20M limit on each mailbox (5x20M = 100M baby! :)
Residential users are not supposed to:
- be operating a business using the residential service (residential service is
considered entertainment only purposes)
- be operating any servers. I believe they do scan ports sometimes but its
usually for actual people running a full blown business
web-server/ftp-server/whatever-server and I haven't honestly seen them going
after joe home-user because he has a ftp server up for his buddy to send him
some files. There's use and abuse of everything as I'm sure you're all aware.
- be using for any illegal activities (not much to be questioned there of course :)
Commercial class customers get:
- same as residential
- different tech support group with priority on technicians when there is a problem
- allowed to run whatever-servers are required for them to do/conduct their business
- have the ability to purchased a higher tier of service (downstream/upstream
speeds) all the way up at a 4Mb/2Mb (yes that is a little b) but it is a
guranteed stream at all times.
- have the ability to have static ip addresses as well as more email addresses
and larger inboxes.
- domain name services
Commercial class customers are not supposed to:
- be doing anything illegal
Oh...and commercial class gets higher priority on the bandwidth. Funny part is
that this actually works out well for our network because Commercial customers
use a lot of bandwidth up until 5PM but thats when they usually close down and
then all the Residential customers get home and start using. Nice how it fits
that way.
Sorry this is so long, Kudos for any of you who have made it this far. Again
this is just my humble opinion and you can take it for what its worth :)
One final note, a cable modem network is just that...a network. You have people
connected on the same network segments just like you would at a LAN at work. As
with any internet connection and ESPECIALLY one that is always on, please take
the necessary precautions while surfing the Net. Have some firewall device or
firewall application running and if you are going to play with servers, make
sure you learn a little about them first so you know more what NOT to do versus
what they can do. This will save you from a lot of grief. Besides, thats what
this list is for, answers to questions about how to not do as well as how to do
things.
Pace
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