Special Report:Six months with a cable modem
The inevitable "cable modem gets slower" story, with a twistAs the months went by and more of my neighbors signed up, the speed degraded. Popular accounts of cable modems mention that congestion will occur as more people sign on, because everyone is using the same network. This turns out to be something of a red herring, because the cable company can always split the network into multiple segments. In my case, the cable network wasn't even close to being overwhelmed. The cable company readily admitted that the congestion was on the network links. The cable company had a fat pipe - a T3 - to the Internet. Unfortunately, that T3 was in a different county. To get to the T3, my data had to pass through a much skinnier pipe - a T1 - that connected the two counties. With the T1 overloaded, download speeds fell to 56K modem scale in the evenings, assuming I could get anywhere. Network outages sometimes lasted for hours. I could still get decent speeds during the day, but it was clear that the network couldn't stand many more users. This went on for two months, and I considered quitting and going back to ISDN. The cable company added another T1 in October, and the system is mostly back to its old self, though bandwidth still falls off in the evening. The lesson in this is that a modem is only as good as the network behind it, and that cable modem ISPs are bound by the same rules as other ISPs when it comes time to add more bandwidth to their networks. Next: Miscellaneous notes, surprises and links
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