I received an article forwarded to me from my son (jweiss@mit.edu).
This article describes an upcoming service which provides
full-speed internet hookup to your home computer via cable TV
(not by phone).

caveats: (1) It won't happen until next year
         (2) It is in the Boston Area, not here
         (3) It will be too expensive

Nevertheless, I think this is an interesting technology and business
issue. The courts have indicated that cable companies can enter this
arena, and it will be interesting to see what it may push the phone
companies to do.

Here is that article he sent me:

------- Beginning of Forwarded message

From jh@mit.edu (Joe Harrington)
Subject: Internet on your cable TV

Continental Cablevision is offering (in January) Internet hookups via
Cable TV.  This is a full 10Mbit/sec hookup, not a simple modem
hookup like we're used to at home.  The catch is that Continental is
only in Cambridge, Arlington, and a few surrounding towns.  They are
talking to the other companies in the area to offer the service
through them.  A big show of customer interest would go far to pull
these other companies into offering the service as well.  If you'd
like to have full-speed Internet access at home, call your local
cable company's customer service number and register your interest.
Here are the details of Continental's service, such as they are:

The articles were in the Globe today (front page and p. 29).   A
Continental representative told me the following:

$70-$100/month, expecting to come down in price.

Available in January.

You get a modem in your house and (he thought) one IP address.

The article mentionned 10Mbit/sec; the rep will confirm this.  He did
assure me that it was "a heck of a lot faster" than the 56kb SLIP
line I now have.

The rep will confirm that you can set up a gateway/router arrangement
connected to your one IP address at no extra charge.

Continental will do their own service areas (Cambridge, Arlington)
and are talking to Warner Cable (Somerville) and others to do
surrounding towns.

Feel free to pass this message on to others (in a sensible
manner...).

- --jh--

--------end of forwarded message

Perhaps we should call Columbia Cable (or your local cable company)
and ask when they will be doing this?

60 responses total.

Perhaps this item is of somewhat more general interest, and ought
to be linked? (agora?)

What possible good is a gateway/router if you only get one IP
address?

Yes, and since this seems to be E-net, the 10/Mbit-sec peak gives a realistic
throughput closer to 2-3Mbit on an active LAN.  $100/month?  Ouch!

$100/month sounds high until you do some comparison shopping.
A leased 56K line from the telco costs aroud $200/month.  Service
from your service provider will probably run another $300/month
or so.  IP connectivity, sadly, isn't cheap.

Re 2: I didn't understand the part about a router and 1 IP address
either.

In fact what I thought was most interesting was that this was a
non-telco approach to communications and it appears to be real.

I am currently paying $200 per 8-month academic year for my son
Jeremy to plug his Mac into the Cornell university Residence-Life
Ethernet. This comes to $25 a month, although it is undoubtedly
subsidised by the University and costs them more than that.

The service he is getting, and the service mju is getting at cmu.edu
seem to be pretty similar to this (1 IP address). This service is
something I drool to have at home. I can get a slow 14.4Kb version of
this for $20 from MSEN (via telco lines). 

At $70/mo for a leased 10Mb connection, this is clearly a competitive
price in today's market. Still, It's too much money for me.
Even though it is almost the equivalent of a 2nd phone line, too.
HOWEVER
Things change quickly. Prices drop. Competition makes this happen.
Here we have someone offering a non-telco version of
ethernet-for-the-masses. I think this could be an important event.
The telephone companies should be afraid, IMO.

Interesting that Cornell makes you pay extra for net connectivity.
At CMU you can connect to the campus Ethernet (with full Internet
access) for nothing more than the cost of an Ethernet card, a
10BaseT cable, and a cabling adapter to plug the 10BaseT cable 
into their IBM Type 2 wiring system.  Oh, you also have to fill
out a form with your machine type, serial number, Ethernet address,
etc., and it takes them about a week to turn the jack on.

One thing to watch out for is reliability.  From what I've heard,
cable companies aren't exactly famed for their downtime records.
In order to be successful, they need to have downtime measured
in seconds (or minutes, at worst) per month.  It needs to be
as reliable as telco service.  10Mb/sec service to the home is
worthless if it's down every third or fourth day.

I think you're paying, Marc. It's in your tuition or room charges.
CMU has a campus-wide ethernet, but Cornell does not.
This is only the 2nd year Cornell has had any dorm rooms wired.
It's called the "Computer Pilot Project", and it's only available
on two floors of one dorm and one floor of another.
They claim the charge is for the routers and their maintenance.
They hand out free "Friendly-Net Adaptors" which are the adaptors
between Apple's Ethernet jack and the 10BaseT wiring. ($79, your
non-Apple adaptors are probably cheaper.)

Next year all of the dorms will be wired, and I think the rules will
change. I think it'll be "free" like at CMU, and you'll have to buy
all the gizmos. We'll see.

All of those people at Cornell w/o ethernet can still use the
Campus SLIP servers over their modems at 14.4K, btw.

---

Will the cable companies be less reliable than the phone systems?
Probably somewhat, at least at first. At least they will be
competing. This will allow the free market to help them
decide on the importance of price, reliability, etc.

Their reliability may improve when the consequences of an outage
change from what they are for their current cable TV business.
This will be interesting to watch - maybe to participate in, one day.

I'm certainly paying for it, but not as a separate fee -- it's bundled
into something else.  CMU actually doesn't have campuswide Ethernet,
though it's close.  Most of the administrative buildings are wired,
and four of the dorms are.  The dorms that aren't wired for Ethernet
have a terminal server in them, for direct serial connections.

Oh. Sorry. I thought CMU dorms were all ethernet.

Assuming those direct serial connections are reasonably fast and
permit SLIP or the like, then you have decent fairness. At Cornell
w/o ethernet you need (1) to buy a modem, and (2) to tie up your
phone. The separate $$ for ethernet balances this unfairness, though
I think it's a bit steep.  I won't defend it beyond that.

re#0: I doubt Columbia Cable would know what the heck you were talking about.
      "Interwhat?"

Yeah, Brian. I probably should have put a smiley on my question at the
end of #0.

Nevertheless. How else will they ever learn that there might be people
who live in their service area who might care about stuff like this?

they won't. :)   Sure, eventually they will, but probably not in the near
future.

Internet via cable is a really interesting prospect though.  Might require
some reworking of cable lines to allow them to be two-way (dunno if this
was discussed already - short term memory. :)  But with the theoretical
coming of ISDN, who knows... 

Of course, if ISDN ever arrives, Internet would only be a subset of it.

ISDN uses the phone to give you a digital connection to a party on the
other end who also has ISDN. High speed (64KB? 128KB? I can't remember)
This cable service strikes me as a higher grade of service..consider.
(1) It doesn't tie up the phone.
(2) They're talking about full ethernet speeds.
(3) It's not metered. (Though local loop ISDN isn't either)
The only disadvantage is that it isn't switched. But wait.
The packets go onto the internet where they are switched digitally
at the packet level. You get the same effect. WHat am I missing?

Isn't this an ISDN killer?

As far as reworking the cable system, I don't have the technical info,
but I believe that the breakthrough is that they have figured out
how to use existing cable without reworking to do this. (They do
need to install an amplifier on your terminus to permit you to send.)

If someone has any better info, please share it.

I kinda assumed that once ISDN was made available, people would use it
for their own Internet hookups.  I heard somewhere that ISDN would be two
64kbps digital lines, and once voice line.  ISDN would probably be cheaper...
:)

ISDN is almost certainly going to be cheaper for point-to-point.
But if you want to hook up to a 64Kb or 128Kb internet connection,
you will also have to pay a network provider for that over and above
the ISDN costs, no? Maybe it will turn out to be comparable in
price, but it offers 10Mb not 128Kb, and it's dedicated not dialup,
and it avoids the potential need for another phone line.

ISDN BRI (Basic Rate Interface) is 2B+1D -- Two 64Kbps channels (each
can run voice or data, independant of the other) and one 16Kbps
channel (usually used for connection control, although it can
transfer data as well).  If you had an Internet connection through an
ISDN line, you would probably make an ISDN data call to your service
provider.  The service provider would then take care of switching your
packets out onto the Internet.  It would basically work a lot like
a high-speed SLIP or PPP line (in fact, you'd probably run SLIP or
PPP over it...).

At Msen we have two pair of ISDN lines - one going at 64K between two
offices running PPP, and the other pair running at 38.4K to my house.
The first pair is going "only" 64K because the terminal adapters (Adtran
ISU-128s) slow down a bunch when you run both channels together - more
bits per second, but there's an annoying 200+ ms delay.

mju is right about the ISDN setup - you're basically making a phone call,
a data call, to someone who has equipment on the other end to turn the
whole mess into an IP connection.

I wonder how that kind of service will compare price/performance versus
a dedicated 10Megabit IP connection for $70/month via cable TV and
thus leaving your phone free.

It's almost a year later.  Does anybody know whether this was successful?

I believe they did bring the service up. After that I have no clue.
I'll ask my kid at MIT to see if he's heard any more of this.

I just noticed this old item in micros and thought the Internet conference
might want to look at it. 

Well, what did your son say, srw?

This sounds impressive.  If not pratical, at least impressive.  A full
10mbit connection is a pretty thing.  Of course, the cable companies
protocols for sending information to your house really wasn't designed
for duplex mode.  So I am sure that there will be problems routing IP
traffic over the cable network.

As far as the 1 ip address thing, that is not a problem.  As long as
the cable company is running a Border Gateway Protocol (bgp or egp),
you can announce as many networks from your machine as you want.  So,
you could have a service running from your home from the connection.

Of course, you would run into some problems with running a service from
your home if the connection is bad or flaky.  One of the most
attractive reasons for attaching to an ISP/NSP is the 24 hour
monitoring that they provide to the network.  Also, most ISP/NSP's have
a large reserve of talent that can be used in fixing problems that
happen.

Overall, I think that this is another of those things where, "You get
what you pay for".

I don't remember the outcome of my question from 7 months ago.
I heard recently that the service is available, but not taking off
wildly. I think there are some problems with it, but I am not certain.

        Jeff Ogden of Merit mentioned to me that Ann Arbor and East Lansing
cable companies are doing some experiments with computer access, but it's
not being offered as a product yet.

I think he mentioned that to me too.

Here's an update from Wired magazine's "updata" section (about
stories they previously reported on):
 
    Last March, Performance Systems International (PSI) and Continental
  Cable Vision announced Internet access delivered over the TV cable
  system.  Would-be customers in Cambridge, Massachusetts were promised
  data rates of 500 Kbits per second for $US125 a month.  More than a
  year has passed, and the service has yet to get off the ground.  One
  problem, says Jeffrey Shapard, PSI's cable product manager, is
  Continental's television cable.  "Some segments are cleaner than
  other segments.  When we run data communications over it, we have to
  tune.  We have the individual service in beta."
 
    Meanwhile, Cambridge residents will have to keep waiting.  For how
  long? Nobody's sure.  "We stopped saying dates.  Every time we say a
  date, we get burned."

Hehehe.  But it is so much fun watching PSI get burned.  <grin>

Thanks for the update, Rob. I didn't realize it went that badly.

for $ 125/month ... seems as if the consumer would be the burned one.

If they let you keep the connection up 24 hours per day, with a consistent
IP address, $125 per month would be pretty cheap.  The lowest price I've
been able to find around here for that sort of thing, at 28.8, is around $140.

  I don't know what I'd do with that kind of bandwidth, but 500Kbps for $125
a month would be awfully tempting.  Grex could sure use a deal like that!!!
I think ICNet & MSEN charge $250/mo for a continuous 64Kbps connection.

Out of curiousity, how do they address the security issues?  (Do they?)

        The service is available now, has anyone tried it?

This is the MediaOne broadband service that is being advertised on TV now (all
over the place it seems.) I got in on the beta test so the installation and
cable modem were free (normally $100) The service runs about $35 per month
and the peak speed is 150Mbs, though I have rarely see better than 20. I have
gotten the full speed from large express down load sites, but most of the
places I visit aren't putting data out that fast. None the less it is quite
fast and certainly makes web browsing a lot faster. the biggest drwback I have
seen is that it is a one way channel. You have to dial in to their modem bank
with a regular modem (I don't think they support more than 33.6 yet) for your
upstream traffic. Since most of the web browsing is donw stream this is not
a big deal, but I'd like to have my phone line open.

        When it came out about a year ago they were charging $50.00 so the
price is dropping already. Anybody else using it?

(Actually, it doesn't make sense for them to use more than 33.6 for dialup,
because the 56 portion of a 56K dialup only comes to you, and data coming to
you comes over the cable.  Data to them would go at 33.6 regardless of whether
or not they used 56K modems.)

I've looked at broadband.  My greatest concern is security.  Can my next-door
neighbor put a packet shiffer on his/her cable modem and get my passwords?
It all dependds on how they segment their network.  I'd have to get ahold of
someone at MediaOne who knows what they're talking about before I'd get
broadband.  One other thing to keep in mind is that performance will degrade
as more people get it, because whole neighborhoods, at least, will be on the
same wire.

That said, I think broadband is a good step in the right direction, because
if nothing else, it will drive down prices for other "fast" internet
connections.

Such as ADSL from the phone companies. It needs some driving down. 

My son got a cable connection in Cambridge, MA (also MediaOne) and found 
that it came with a bridge. It appears to be not very effective, though, 
at keeping ones packets out of one's neighbor's house, but in his case 
the purpose is primarily to connect to MITnet, which is pretty 
thoroughly kerberized. All of the connections he makes are authenticated 
with kerberos, but there is still some exposure unless the entire 
session is encrypted.

Somebody I work with (our NT administrator) is using the MediaOne cable modem,
since he was finding that ISDN wasn't fast enough for remote NT adinistration.
I think he's doing everything over an IP tunnel, which is encrypted, so the
security problems are lessened.  He's reporting pretty good speeeds on it for
now, but I'm skeptical about how long they'll be able to keep up the speed
if it gets popular.

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss