I had ADSL installed while retaining the cable modem for awhile. My ADSL
service is from Southwestern Bell. There is a small selection of ISPs
available. I choose SBIS, which is Southwestern Bell's
ISP, for at least the
startup period. Additional ISPs are being added to the list regularly. In my
case I chose the base ADSL service which offers speeds that are "guaranteed" to
be at least 384K and may be up to 1.5M depending on distance from the telco
equipment and other factors. A higher grade of service, offering 1.5M as the
guaranteed minimum, is available at a higher cost. ADSL is asymmetric and
upload speed is 128K for the service I purchased. It is possible to upgrade
from one to the other without changing
the equipment at the customer's
site. Information on ADSL as provided by SWB can be found at
I'll
comment on my experience with @Home in three categories: infrastructure
(i.e. the raw access to the Internet), ISP services (such as mail and news),
and customer service. I was one of the early users of @Home in my area and was
initially pleased with it. Not dialing up is great and the speed was a big
improvement over an analog modem. Within a month I was less pleased having
experienced outages lasting from a few minutes to 24 hours. This was the
beginning of my becoming an expert on the meaning of the various flashing and
"dancing" lights on my cable modem. Still, during the first few months it
worked well a majority of the time and I felt @Home probably just needed time
to iron out the cable plant issues. Beginning in the winter access became
definitely problematic with recurring outages. After frequent complaints, and a
what I considered a rather nasty campaign by some local @Home users,
reliability improved for a short while. Average access speed never came close
to what was experienced the first few months. Outages continued on nearly a
weekly basis. About two months ago the service once again degraded to the point
where it was often completely out. At times when it was working the speed
ranged from a little faster than a 56K modem to 100 times slower than an analog
modem (literally 100 times slower). These slow downs were not related to any
particular site or service on the Internet but were caused by @Home
infrastructure. High dropped-packet rates were the norm. For a period of
several months using my dialup ISP (Mindspring) was definitely preferable to
@Home most of the time. To summarize, in a period of a year I had major
problems (i.e. outages lasting multiple days) more months than not. These
ongoing problems, coupled with the customer service issues noted later, were
the main reasons I decided to evaluate ADSL. Note also that the problems I
experienced were far from an isolated case. You wouldn't
believe some of the
conversations I could here in the background
while talking with @Home's tech
support people.
As an ISP, @Home provides mail and news servers as well as its own content.
This mostly amounts to information already available on the Internet and is of
little value to me. The only high point of their
content was Eric Elia's
technology reports. He's
excellent and I hope he moves to another company so
I can once again follow his reporting. The mail server was problematic for most
users in our area. Lots of complaints about lost mail and outages lasting many
hours. Sending mail was always very slow. Often slower than using a dialup
line. The news server always seemed to
perform very well but @Home's article
retention was the shortest of any ISP service I've
ever used. Overall, @Home's
services were below average but not bad enough to be a serious issue for me.
Incredibly poor customer service gave the
unreliability of @Home's
infrastructure a real run for the money in terms of the number one reason to
look for an alternative. First and foremost is @Home's
deliberate stonewalling
regarding problems. There was no published information on network/service
problems. If you use other ISPs, such as Mindspring or SBIS,
you can easily check newsgroups or web pages where they post status
information. In the case of @Home, they work hard to ensure problems are kept
secret. Even the customer service reps often have no information on planned or
unplanned outages. Also, in my many calls with both the California call center
and the local call center, a tremendous amount of mistaken and misleading
information is commonly given out. Finger pointing was also taken to new
heights. I've
worked in computers and telecommunications all my life and have
to say that @Home/Charter Communications makes the old Ma Bell's
look
responsive. California would point at the local people, who would point back at
California. The local @Home technicians would blame the cable plant and the
cable plant would blame the @Home techs. These runarounds would go on for days
and even weeks with no one ever actually getting down to finding and fixing the
problem. At least at our local call center, they absolutely would refuse to
let you talk to a manager. I resorted to calling the local General Manager
directly in attempts to get someone to actually fix the problem. In the "last
straw"
outage which lasted nearly one month, I made more than 20 phone calls to
@Home/Charter plus sent several FAXes. Service calls to my house were missed
without notice (I don't
mean late, I mean never came and never called). Also
during this entire outage, I received not a single call back from anyone
regarding the trouble except for two times when I filed complaints with our
city and the Better Business Bureau. Who needs this kind of grief in order to
get a company to deliver a service I'm
paying for? Not me! Note that the
outages in my area were caused by both technology problems (electrical ingress)
and operations problems.
I had expected the cable companies might try to improve their reputation for
bad service as they delivered @Home since they were competing directly with
phone companies, which don't
exactly have a stellar reputation either. I was
clearly wrong in @Home's
case. @Home makes the horror stories people used to
have getting ISDN installed and working look tame (ISDN usually worked once it
was installed and stable). With some reluctance I decided to give the phone
company ADSL service a try.
I have been very pleasantly surprised by the ADSL experience. I had expected a
series of glitches getting everything working and had expected the performance
to be significantly less than the cable modem. In reality, there have been no
problems after installation. For this reason I cannot compare their customer
support with @Home. Reliability is much more important to me than absolute
performance and ADSL clearly is doing a better job. Phone companies, and their
equipment makers, have long had to deal with issues of noise and echo and it
seems they've
done a much better job of creating equipment that works properly
in real-world conditions. I've
never lost sync on my ADSL modem compared with
losing sync at least once a day on my cable modem. I always kept my cable modem
where I could see it's
status lights. My ADSL modem is stashed out of sight in
a closet. Performance of the ADSL infrastructure is very stable. And it
compares very favorably to a cable modem. I've
achieved speeds of 145Kbytes for
downloads. I can watch streaming video while downloading at speeds of greater
than 100Kbytes. For my needs these are excellent numbers. The SBIS mail server
is faster than @Home's.
The news server is not quite as fast as @Home's but the
retention time for articles is much, much longer.
For the first time I feel I'm
truly seeing the promise of a high bandwidth
connection. I can stream video and audio for hours on end without
interruption. I could never do this on @Home due to network interruptions. It
would run for at most an hour or two at a time.
If you're
considering ADSL and cable modem service, my experience would
indicate you might be better off starting with ADSL. The actually delivered
performance of ADSL is much better on average and the packet loss rate is
virtually non-existent. At least with SBIS, the mail and news servers seem to
work well. If your only choice is cable, and ADSL will not be available soon,
you probably should go ahead and go for @Home. All I can say is I hope the
quantity of people dropping @Home lately will get the attention of the company
to improve its customer service and reliability. The cable infrastructure will
always be more variable in service delivery than ADSL, but should be able to deliver reliability much better than I experienced.
Last modified Sun Jun 27 14:37:01 1999.
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