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November 16, 2001

I abandoned cable for DSL when my wife and I moved to a new home that’s located 1100 feet from the DSLAM. (I have no idea what DSLAM stands for, but it’s the thing you need to be near for better speed.) So far my speeds are slower than with cable, but more on that later.


October 11, 1999

My cable provider is Total-Web/Gwinnett Cablevision. My cable modem is a Com 21, a black, painfully ugly device reminiscent of the cable boxes that were used back during the first days of cable television. (Cisco, 3Com and RCA cable modems I’ve seen are much more attractive than mine.) The cable modem is connected to my Mac’s built-in 10Base-T Ethernet port. (Most Macs—and all currently shipping Macs—have built-in Ethernet.) There’s the “cable” cable that runs from the switch outside of my house to the rear of the modem. Lastly, there a power cord with a huge black block transformer.

Configuring a Mac to use a cable modem is extremely simple. You have to fill in a few simple entries in your TCP/IP control panel and you’re off and running. Actually, setting up a Mac to use and cable modem and having your Mac use the a cable modem is simpler than setting up and using a regular dial-up modem. Oh, and the speed is a little different, too.

The fastest speed I’ve seen from my cable modem is 138K/sec. What this translates to in the real world is downloading Netscape Communicator 4.7, a 13.3M file in about a minute and a half. See Figure 1. For comparison, a common download time for a dial-up modem is about an hour and 15 minutes. Even with all of this speed, people whose primary Internet activity is sending and receiving email won’t see much of a speed improvement. With something as simple as email, there’s just not much of a perceptible difference between waiting two seconds for a message to complete and waiting one second.

Another huge advantage cable modems have over dial-up modems is that cable modems are always connected to the Internet. When you want to check your email, a stock price or something else for which an Internet connection is required, all you have to do is open the appropriate application and what you want starts filling your screen. There’s no waiting for your modem to negotiate with your Internet service provider’s modem. Persistent connectivity by itself is enough reason to get a cable modem if cable Internet access is available in your area.

But cable modems, mine included, don’t always work as I’ve described. Sometimes my modem won’t communicate with the cable company. And sometimes when I am connected to the cable company, I can’t surf the Web. When service is out, it may be at a time when I definitely need it to work. Because of this, I keep a trusty little dial-up modem nearby.

I’ll offer you a tip that has caused my cable modem to function when I didn’t think it would before I learned this tip myself. The tip is to power cycle the cable modem. For me, this means unplugging the power to the mode, waiting for 10 seconds, then plugging the power back in. Sometimes it takes up to five cycles to get the cable modem to communicate with the cable company. I’ve only experienced one instance where the power cycling the cable modem didn’t make it communicate with cable company. I was out of cable-based Internet access for about four hours.

The power-cycling tip doesn’t solve the problem of sometimes being unable to surf the Web even when your connected. This is caused by the inability of the cable modem to communicate with the cable company’s domain name servers. The name server's job is to translate the names that you type in to their Internet protocol (IP) addresses. For instance, instead of typing “www.versiontracker.com,” you could type in 209.68.63.234. The only workaround for this problem is to know the actual IP address of the site you wish to visit.

How do you know what your favorite Web sites’ IP address are? Well, you have to look them up before you run into the problem. Otherwise, you’ll simply wait until your cable company can communicate with the domain name servers again (which could be anywhere from 2 minutes to several hours). You can find the IP address for a specific site by using a ping or trace utility. For the Mac, WhatRoute is a good choice.

Having a cable modem adds $40 to my monthly cable bill. Comcast@Home, the cable provider for my friend Jefferson, bills its customers on their credit cards each month. The monthly fee includes the cable modem, Internet access (which means you aren’t required to have another provider such as MindSpring or AOL), three email accounts, 10M of Web space and toll-free 24/7 technical support.