[linux-help] Re: cablemodem question

[John Goerzen <jgoerzen@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Jan 31, 2003 at 10:25:49AM -0600, gLaNDix (Jesse Kaufman) wrote:
> 
> price up! :(  right now, i'm borrowing a surfboard from the Cox guy that

Well I can interject a bit here.  When I lived in Indianapolis, I had
Comcast@Home.  They first gave me a Toshiba modem.  It died after about a
year, and they replaced it with a Surfboard.  The guy that came out to
"check my lines" (read: "deliver my modem") said that ever since they
switched to the Surfboards, he was finding far fewer bad modems.  So the
Surfboards seem reasonable.

> is anyone else having similar problems w/ cox?  if so, any ideas where to

Well, at work here in Hesston we have business class cable modem service
from them.  It's basically the same equipment that you get with residential
service but no caps on the speed, a heftier price tag, several static IPs,
and (reasonably) clueful tech support.  We've got a surfboard here.

I've been keeping an open trouble ticket in our internal support system
since November tracking reliability.  It looks like through about the first
week in December, it was going down approximately every 3-5 days for
approximately 5 - 10 minutes each time.  Usually the quickest way to get
service back was to power cycle the modem.

Then in early December, they had a major outage -- took down all of Hesston
and possibly Newton for most of the day.  Since then, we've only had one
outage.  Seems that they replaced whatever it was that was going dead.

> paying for an "always on" connection which is rather a "eh, maybe i'll
> work, maybe i won't" connection :S

I live outside the city so can't get cable modem there.  I've been using a
$10 dialup account from intergate.com.  Their auth server seems to die about
once a month on a Saturday evening, but other than that I can't complain (I
use my own mail server so can't comment on that).  kansas.findanisp.com is a
good resource.  Hint: select your city, then do a search: include
non-sponsors, sort by monthly cost, and select "supports Linux".

-- John


> 
> > You may or may not be aware of the fact that you
> > cannot simply plug in a new modem and go merrily on your way.  You have
> > to call Cox and give them the model and serial of your new modem.  I
> > don't know the reason for this as you can use a switch on your modem and
> > hook up as many computers to the same modem as you like.....Larry
> 
> the reason being is because they need the MAC address, since they use this
> to prevent people from just getting a modem and plugging in to get free
> internet (like they used to be able to do! :P)
> 
> gLaNDix
> 
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-- 
John Goerzen <jgoerzen@xxxxxxxxxxxx>                       www.complete.org
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