Slashdot Mirror
Time Warner Customers Get Free Wi-Fi Hotspots
Hotspots writes with a link to a BusinessWeek article discussing a new service that Time Warner Cable is offering to its customers. Flying in the face of most business decisions about Wi-Fi availability, Time Cable customers will soon be able to turn their connections into public wireless hotspots. This privilege comes as Time Warner inks a deal with the Spanish startup Fon, which is already operating a similar deal with ISPs in Europe. "For Time Warner Cable, which has 6.6 million broadband subscribers, the move could help protect the company from an exodus as free or cheap municipal wireless becomes more readily available. Fon was founded in Spain in 2005 on the premise that people shouldn't have to pay twice -- once at home, then again in a coffee shop -- for Internet access. At first, the company offered software that let members, called Foneros, turn Wi-Fi routers into shared access points, but it took hours to get up and running."
They couldn't maintain a cable internet connection at my house much longer than 30 to 45 days before some contractor screwed up the line amplifiers in the neighborhood, or a squirrel gnawed through their cables. Then, after waiting twenty minutes on hold listening to sales pitches for their digital phone and security monitoring, I get told it will be two to three days before someone can come out to look at the problem. Good freakin' luck.
She said ISPs should embrace Fon because the routers, which require that "aliens" enter a valid credit card number before getting online, put a sharp stop to the leeching.
Moves like this really don't seem to help the public in terms of security education, IMHO...
This guy's the limit!
What about yesterday's news that "Open WAP = Probable Cause?"?
4 31211
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/23/1
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Time Warner subscribes to holistic IT. Why risk invasive repairs when incense and herbs are so much safer?
want to turn their connection into a free wireless hot-spot?
You pay for a 1-4 MB connection and have the potential to share it with 20-30 of your closest friends or what? Wouldn't be worth it in my opinion unless you're a business or something and just want to attract customers.
yes, I have TWC in NYC and it SUX.
My verizon dsl was so much better,
but they won't wire my new apt.
something about the neighbor's
backyard and pitbulls were a few of
the obstacles they mentioned.
music lover since 1969
Second, no-one can sue you if they can't prove you were downloading the movie... if you've got a public WiFi, it could've been anyone, right?
Agile Artisans
How can TW be responsible for some third party physically damaging cables (s)he had no right to touch? Is TW also responsible if the power company "browns out" so your computer won't work? What about if your dog chews through the UTP cable inside your house?
I understand their customer service could be better, but to say they are incapable of maintaining a cable connection when somebody else destroys it, is just silly.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Roadrunner works GREAT for me. I couldn't be happier.
Obviously, some people have better luck than others. I am a very happy RR customer and look forward to using these hotspots as they come online.
Reliability is inversely proportional to competition. As competition increases, reliability decreases. Why would this be so? It is not in the competition's vested interest for you to have a reliable connection from their competitor.
I regret that I only have one mod point to give per post.
Different services like this usually offer things like reciprocal access (ie you get to use other participating people's APs), rebates on your bill, cash, points, etc.
So wait,
I pay Time Warner for bandwidth. Then I use Fonera's software so that I can give my bandwidth away to others. They pay Fonera a couple bucks for a day of access, and Fonera splits this price with Time Warner.
Anything I'm missing here?
Seems like you'd be better off investing in some quality Florida swampland
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
In the article it states that you currently have to pay to get onto the wifi hotspots in Starbucks. I find this odd. Here in Australia, if a cafe has wifi, it is pretty much always free. They figure that it is pretty unlikely you'll use more bandwidth than the cost of your coffee would pay for, anyway.
La Fonera routers are great: They sent me mine for free, and then I reflashed it with DD-WRT. It's a real piece of crap, but I can't complain about getting a free router :-)
Competition drives price down, so suppliers reduce reliability (and quality and customer service etc) to compensate for the lower prices. Potential customers cannot easily measure quality, but can readily see who has the lowest price, so they usually make their decisions on price alone. This favours the suppliers with the lowest price but the worst reliability.
To be fair, I think that gives me access to T-Mobile hotspots, but I have no need for those.
Reliability is inversely proportional to competition. As competition increases, reliability decreases.
...
...
Your astute economic analysis explains why after 70 years that Toyota, the horrendously unreliable competition to ultra-reliable GM, is now the world's top selling car manufacturer
oh wait
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
http://www.speakeasy.net/ has allowed this for a long time. Their terms of use actually encourage sharing, and long before FON showed up, Speakeasy facilitated such sharing by finding ways for customers to earn revenue for it. One of the few surviving independent ISPs out there, I think Speakeasy deserves a lot of kudos for their policies. Of course, now that they are Best Buy we'll see how long it all lasts.
FON is interesting for it's dual network access point. I'm running one right now (in Austria) and it does a fine job. It does seem to suffer a bit when both public and private networks are in use, though. It also "phones home" for regular updates that are outside my control. A few weeks ago one such update killed our ability to pick up Google Mail via SSL/POP. The fixed the bug within a couple weeks, but it is still odd to be running my network with an access point so totally out of my control.
AT&T (nee SBC, nee Ameritech) DSL customers in Chicago (probably all IL) get access to all their wi-fi hotspots for a token $1 a month. You get pretty good tech support too, they'll patiently walk you through the login page, rest your password, etc. at 9 PM for $1 a month. Death Star maybe, but they do their homework.
They were recently bought by Best Buy, to the chagrin of many.
The response above is to the argument made by TWC that customers should have to pay for their service twice, once at home, and once at the coffee shop. AT&T customers pay only once anyway (well, apart from the token $1).
Every evening, I go home and start up my work laptop, and can easily see 5 or 6 "free hotspots" that customers of Bright House offer.
Welcome to the world of wired communications. Judging by your comment, it sounds like you've never had a dialup or DSL connection. While typical dialup problems were noise on the line, the world of DSL is (was) a fun one. I provisioned DSL circuits for a regional (Maine through virginia / East coast) ISP back in the late 90's. We would often spend months trying to get Covad/Northpoint/NAS to get Verizon to install circuits, only to learn that either the loop was too long, or that the line was poor quality and they wouldn't install a new one. Often, it'd be ridiculous things like Verizon installing the line at the wrong building, or wrong floor, or the tech was scared of a dog and didn't install it. Some people don't realize how good things have gotten lately since the cable companies have taken the bulk of broadband control.
Service is good in Houston.
I don't use warner cable (Dish) because the "digital" cable signal was digital crap. The signals were much better five years ago than today. I don't think they are watching their satellites any more. You get something that is a bad signal on a 27" TV and yet other stations are crystal clear. To me that says they are taking a bad signal, digitizing it and sending that out.
However... my cable connection is fine and runs about $54 a month.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
With the car analogy, one has to look far back to see the truth. The old model Fords were an order of magnitude more reliable than vehicles today. Granted they lacked many of the features and safety they do today. Why is this true? The first vehicles were made to last longer, vehicles today have maybe a tenth of the lifespan. Also, you can not dismiss sabotage so readily. It can and does happen.
I regret that I only have one mod point to give per post.
I worked at the TWC in Houston a few years back and they were doing this THEN. I don't understand why the sudden announcement...
Maybe it was for business class customers only.. but I don't think that was the case.
You're nothing; like me.
...I might have to get my own access instead of leeching off my neighbors!
We have a large list of all the zones in our district, all with specific building codes and regulations that state what we can and cannot do with the cable. Some places actually ban us completely from burying any new wires or doing anything to repair them (as the construction/tearup of the ground would look unsightly), so the most that we're left to do is to try and neaten up the cable as best possible (though some city zones even forbid this. You don't want to be a customer living in those areas.)
Slashdot - Come for the creative thought, stay for the lesbians!
This may be a new thing in the U.S., but it has been part of the multiplay packages going in all over Europe.
/. moderations for that
ISPs who lease or just install a CPE box will have multiple WiFi SSIDs running. One for the client, the other advertising their network. So whenever a client roams and finds an access point with the name of their provider, they can use their login credentials and get their own internet connection. This second connection is completely separate from the client's connection, there is no shared IP address or bandwidth.
I think there is a big gap in knowledge of how modern broadband works between those in the U.S. and those in Europe or the Far East. I'm seeing this more and more on american oriented sites like slashdot, "ignorance" is too strong a word, but certainly "lack of understanding" comes close. Internet technologies are pulling way ahead outside of the U.S., where the last mile has seen great advances in both business models and creative uses of technology. When the bandwidth of the last mile (between a head-end and the customer premises) gets sufficient to put multiple channels down the line, the client can get much, much more than just an internet connection. With fibre installations going in, the bandwidth can support multiple HD video channels, multiple internet connections, multiple voice channels, private VPN options, roaming, etc. A client can just choose which bandwidth package they want, e.g. Symmetric or Asymmetric, 10 Mbps or 100 Mbps or more. A handful of TV channels, or more than you could ever watch. VoIP calling plans, that are so cheap that calling most of Europe or North America is free for the first few thousand minutes.
So one of the providers in the U.S. had an executive who took a vacation in Europe, saw the amazing new multiplay boxes, and decided it was a good idea to beat their few oligarchic non-rivals to the punch. I'm glad it's News for Nerds in the U.S., things are looking up over there.
the AC
this post needs some emoticons for slight amounts of sarcasm, some humour, and kind of a tsk-tsk sideways look indicating a mix of sympathy and pity, good luck finding
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
For Bittorent and other p2p users living in big metro areas this would provide a good level of cover from the MAFIAA. So long as they use a separate public IP for their FON then they'll be covered as a common carrier. If they can maintain at least one other user on their FON network then the mafiaa won't be able to tell which user was the one that did the illegal uploading.
When they serve their court order for the FON log the best they can get is a list of users who were connected at that time. I bet they won't be able to match up the mac addresses either.
That way they could have one for the AP and one for your traffic. Since the AP is almost certainly natted, they could even have the AP give out addresses on a 10.x subnet and perform NAT at the router for the neighborhood. That way it wouldn't be possible to tell whether a particular packet came from my Access Point or my neighbors.
The first vehicles were made to last longer, vehicles today have maybe a tenth of the lifespan
You know of a time when cars were designed to run for one million miles or fifty years, whichever came first?
The first cars, mass-produced or not, broke down ALL THE TIME. If they seemed to last longer, it's because (1) people didn't drive nearly as much as they do today, and (2) they were constantly maintaining them.
TW reliability has been incredable. I have had no outages or connection issues related to RR in years (my power is less reliable). Ther are no other options (AT&T still can't get DSL north of Austin). But with always on (VPN to my work proves that), why would I want any?
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
Nothing like having your digital phone,internet,cable going dead all just about every month for hours on end. If you go to http://help.rr.com/ it's almost certain there's some kind of network problem happening at the moment or during the past couple of days. I remember when I first got Internet service from them. I felt kind of bad though, because right after the broadband was installed an entire street lost their cable connections.
I've got two net connections to my house, 6MB down/.5MB up & 20MB down/2MB up, so a typical 802.11g connection or two isn't gonna be much of a hit. The net traffic most hotspots see is quite bursty, rarely a sustained file transfer or p2p swarm. Also most hotspots start to saturate at about a dozen clients so there's another limit. Throw a little QOS & traffic shaping on there and I'm not gonna notice a thing.
However in this neighborhood it's all single family residential; a stranger in a parked car in front of a house for any extended period would cause one of the neighbors to call for a police car to wander by. However previously I lived next to a large pubic park, and was interested in sharing service to it via Île Sans Fil.
However in both locations my Terms Of Service forbid such, and not wanting any hassle I've refrained. However should my ISP enable such, or even encourage it with a reciprocity system, I'd be interested. Particularly with the knowledge that folks using my connection would have an audit trail associated with 'em in case of problem.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
I work for TWC's customer support
;)
You shouldn't have told me that - now I'm going to hassle you endlessly!
Seriously though, what's up with the crappy pixellated images on the digital cable channels, and the blocking and tiling on the HD channels? We've had reps out to our house to look at it, we've tried every suggestion TWC made to fix it, and it still happens. Is it like that for everyone, or do I just live in an area with too little bandwidth?
Your fantasies contain the seeds of important concepts.
I'm a happy RR customer as well. I have a computer running torrents 24/7/365 without any complaints from TimeWarner or worrying about a bandwith cap (Azureus reports 1.25TB down/1.75TB up). You can't say that about a lot of the ISPs out there today.
I don't know why any kind of additional agreements would be needed... people should be able to do what they like with their Net connections, but that's kind of irrelevant. I like the FON setup. It still needs a lot of work to make it more professional looking in the US, but the principle behind it is good. I've paid to use several different FON hotspots because I don't have Net usage at home (If I had Net at home, I could share it, and use all other FON hotspots for free). If I get a home Net connection, I'll definitely set up a FON router. I'm not sure if I'd take free access to other FON hotspots, or if I'd be happy charging others to use my FON hotspot, but I'll definitely participate.
I don't respond to AC's.
I have a similar experience. Time Warner has treated me very well. They keep increasing my bandwidth without increasing the price, and recently they got news servers with almost two weeks of article retention! Just to download the headers for that much data takes a long time. I'm scared of moving out of Central New York partly because I don't expect to get an equally competent ISP somewhere else. Verizon has recently installed fiber optics in my neighborhood, but I looked at their offer and scoffed: They will have to do a whole lot better to beat Road Runner!
Where in Central NY are you? I'm in Ithaca, and I've had RR for a few years now, at the same address. The reliability is decent, and they haven't raised prices, but I haven't noticed this bandwidth increase that you speak of. Which to me is a bad sign. In this business, if you're not moving forward, you're falling behind.
I agree....while RoadRunner is pricier than the other options (even compared to Cox -- who owned the monopoly rights to my neighborhood up until about a year and a half ago), but neither Cox nor RR gave me connection fits. I tried DSL once and couldn't ever get it to work. Returned their hardware and cancelled service.
I look at AT&T for DSL every once in a while (and Grande for a bundle, too), but neither serve my area in north Austin with anything more than the lowest speed DSL (1.5Mbps). Since I work from home frequently and have a family that is constantly one the Internet (4 desktops, 2 laptops, and the occassional network enabled device), the 1.5Mbps just isn't enough bandwidth. I'll take the (advertised) 6Mbps (actual probably closer to 4.5Mbps) that I get and wish for more.
Layne
I used to have reliability issues with my RR connection, but after replacing my cable modem with a new model, it has been flawless.
Also, some time in the last few months, they have massively upgraded their news servers here in Kansas City. Not only do they have 2 weeks of retention, but I can download from the newsgroups at around 7.5mb/s
Gizmodo covered a day where FON offered everyone a free Fonera (little wireless router/point thing) for signing up and naturally they were totally swamped, but I got one and it works ok, though it doesn't really help me or anyone else to keep it running in my home in the middle of nowhere. I have, though, used the little map to check out where people are running theirs around Atlanta, for instance, and the coverage at the time (I think this was last fall) looked pretty decent. It's a neat concept but the partnership with TW will either kill it or elevate it. I saw it as being much more useful in Latin America than the US.
Potential customers cannot easily measure quality, but can readily see who has the lowest price, so they usually make their decisions on price alone.
Naive potential customers can't. However, the general consensus in this area that the Cable is cheaper for the same speed levels, but the downtime over the last five years has averaged about ten times higher, including regular multi-day outages. This is easily discovered with even the slightest effort at research. The local university Mac support mailing list regularly turns into a gripe session/reliability comparison every time the local Cable modem service craps out and the local Telco DSL doesn't. The IT support professionals' mail list only gives it passing mention, since this is the expected state of the world, but it's nice to be warned that your users will be complaining. The university IT department's page listing local non-university high speed services very clearly mentions but "does not recommend" the local CableCo offering. The U. Bookstore, local white box and repair shops, BestBuy, CircuitCity, Staples, the local wireless-equipped coffee shops, and any other retail outlet with a geek on staff all are quick to mention the reliability issue.
Now, for a college grad student on a lentils-and-ramen budget who lives within walking distance of the University's highly reliable network, the savings can easily allow for another case of beer per month (or more), in exchange for the occasional walk of a few blocks with their laptop. Furthermore, since the cable ISP problems are usually related to the summer thunderstorms, it's even less of a risk than first glance would suggest. So, for a large market segment hereabouts, even when informed, the tradeoff is acceptable.
On the other hand, for telecommuters, serious IT geeks, students who really hate the public computer labs, and anyone with no patience for a company that can't figure out there's an area problem until forty people call in at the same time saying their internet has been down for the last three days... DSL is the way to go.
It's not just a question of competition and imperfect information; it's a question of different quality offerings, since the market has a non-uniform demand curve for reliability.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Time Warner (Now Bright House Networks in Tampa, Florida Area) is awsome. I have the Digital Combo. Road Runner 15/m down, 2/m up. Digital Cable, and Digital Phone. The guy wired the house in a timely manner and he did everything right. I havn't had any problems since ive been with them. I was a regular tw customer (just regular internet) before, but just had to upgrade!
I think all the people who modded this "funny" don't live any where near NYC...
I've had awesome luck with TW cable everywhere I've been. DSL on the other hand...never again.
I'm also in Ithaca on RR. I've had their service for ~5 years now at the same address. I can only recall one outage in the past 3 years (since replacing all lines to my house) that lasted less than an hour. During those 5 years my speeds have gone from ~1Mbps to a solid 8Mbps today, with ocassional bursts to 15+ Mbps. That's significant progress to me.
They just doubled the bandwidth here in the Capital District. And just to pour salt in the wound, my area just received a new promotion for new customer's... their cable/VoIP/RR service for $99 a month. New customers only, but we just moved into a new apartment, so we count as new customers. Not sure if it's in the whole Capital District, though... Verizon just came through and dropped the lines for FIOS, so I'm assuming these new deals by Time Warner is an attempt to staunch the flow of people switching over to Verizon. Can't see why, though... FIOS does have the better bandwidth, but I don't want to deal with a Verizon landline (been there, done that). They don't have the TV over FIOS yet in this area, either... it's provided through some little satellite dish (may be a partnership with DirectTV, if I remember correctly). No thanks. The reliability of TW in this area is pretty good, too... it goes down maybe twice a year. Within a few hours, there's a TW truck sitting in the neighborhood.
Yeah, GP looks pretty damn incensed ...
29 mpg. YMMV.
With fibre installations going in, the bandwidth can support multiple HD video channels, multiple internet connections, multiple voice channels, private VPN options, roaming, etc. A client can just choose which bandwidth package they want, e.g. Symmetric or Asymmetric, 10 Mbps or 100 Mbps or more.
I've seen this firsthand in Northern California as I have been one of the fortunate individuals to get Surewest internet service. They offer symmetrical 10/20/50 Mbps packages for relatively modest (atleast 10/20Mbps prices , and also provide HD TV and phone service. Unfortunately most of the phone companies in the US have their heads so far up their asses that they cannot see the light of day in regards to fiber being the future.
I have to replace my modem every 1-2 years. As far as KC is concerned, the service is great as long as you never have to deal with their tech support. They still do the 'tell me something so I can deny support' thing. My last dealing with them, tech support on Sunday listened until he heard that my router wasn't supplied by RR. As it turns out, all he needed to do was log into my modem and he would have seen that it was logging errors. Or listen when I told him the modem was supplying a private IP to my router. At least that's what the tech on Monday told me. Swapped for a new modem at the TWC store and I should be good for another year or so.
Now if they could just figure out how to make their new digital guide software work. On-Demand rarely works any more.
It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit. -- Harry Truman
project lilypad is a time warner thing in cincinnati... is lilypadusa like a prototype or something? i have heard about FON mostly in europe... they don't seem to have much density in the USA.
speaking of free access points for members, before lilypad in cincinnati, the local phone company cincinnati bell offers access to hotspots free for it's customers. the cinbell solution seems to be mostly gas stations and family restaurants.
sarcasm:
-noun
1. harsh or bitter derision or irony.
You know, I've had Time Warner RoadRunner for just about 10 years now and aside from a few issues related to a flaky cable modem during the first couple years, it's really been flawless!
I've really had no issues with RoadRunner that I can remember for the last 5 years.
Of course, from what I've heard Time Warner / RoadRunner San Diego is one of the best.
Time Warner isn't exactly the first ISP to offer such a service. Over in Britain, BT have been offering free 'WiFi minutes' to subscribers to one of their services called the 'Home Hub', which includes broadband, phone and wireless services. BT probably wasn't the first either.
Same here. I've had RR since it was first introduced in Houston and have had only 2 instances of outage. And since I work with many small - medium businesses on the IT side, I can say Time Warner has done well in that arena as well. The only problem I ever seem to have, is finding the numbers to call for support. I don't have them memorized like I do for SBC DSL.
Consider yourself luck you don't have Comcast. I had TWC until last December when Comcast bought them out. 2 months later, after getting a letter stating all the service would remain the same and prices wouldn't change, they jacked the prices on everything up. Now my Bittorrent downloads top out at around 100 mb/sit with the average being around 45-50. At least with TWC's ($5 a month cheaper) service I would consistently hit the 300-400 range. Gee thanks Comcast for charging me more for less bandwidth! At the time I thought Time Warner wasn't all that great, now I would be very happy to have them back...
"But this one goes to 11!"
Yeah, and I still drive my '88 Camaro. If only I had been around to buy the '08 Camaro - I could still be driving it today!
"But this one goes to 11!"
I second that. I had Qwest DSL for about 5 years in 2 different locations. First was okay because I was literally about 500 feet from a switching station. DSL went out twice in 2 1/2 years - once due to a storm, once for unknown reasons. Moved to second location and was too far away from switching station to get anything but the bare minimum speeds. About a year and a half into service at new location, one day DSL stopped working. Called Qwest who said they had a disconnect request for my DSL. Kind of strange seeing I never requested it to be shut off. Had to wait 2 weeks for "installer" to "connect me" again. What a load of crap. About 6 months later after a few more minor (less than a few hours) outages, I switched to a cable connection and never looked back. Haven't had a single outage save for a glich in my cable modem which a reset fixed. Wish I still had Time Warner, but the sold out to Comcast. I never knew how good I had it with TWC until Comcast came along. Let's just say that my speeds are less than Comcastic, and now I am paying about $10 more a month for my internet/cable bill....
"But this one goes to 11!"
However previously I lived next to a large pubic park, Please tell me more about this "pubic" park. Are the trees all thick and curly?
with the Public WiFi Project.
The latter offers modified routers to small businesses like restaurants and cafes that would like to offer free WiFi to attract foot traffic. It's paid for by advertising which appears in a banner above the actual Web page as you surf. The advertising is entirely local businesses to local users.
Their concept is that the Net should be like TV - free with advertising - but non-intrusive advertising.
They're only in a few smaller cities at this point, but the business model is interesting. In a way, it's similar to the way the Opera browser used to be ad-supported - a small banner ad at the top of the page. No popups or mods to Web pages. The difference here is that the ads are all for local businesses targeted to local users.
If the Fon guys and the PWFP hooked up, everybody could offer free WiFi and get a little revenue from advertising provided by their router and external servers.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
We're about to move to a place where Atlantic Broadband is the local monopoly instead of TWC. I guess I should be glad it isn't Comcast. I've heard too many horror stories about them!
Your fantasies contain the seeds of important concepts.
Funny - I have TWC in Queens (Astoria), and the service is excellent. I regularly get 1000kbytes/sec download speeds, and upload speeds of up to 64kbytes/sec. My service has never been interrupted. The contractor who installed the line was friendly, clean, efficient, and good at what he did (I've never crimped cables so neatly or quickly; I've also never mounted cables along the baseboards as neatly as he did). Sorry you're not happy with them...
Wireless access point. Apply directly to the forehead.
Bah! My neighbour has had this service through TWC for years, and I don't have to pay.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
It's worth noting that Toyota got a lot of help from Ford with their early post-war forays into auto-making. There's no doubt that Toyota has almost revolutionized the way quality control is practiced by many assembly-line processes (A quick Google of "TPS Toyota" will basically confirm this), but they also didn't start from the ground up. They're also very willing to license their hybrid technology to other auto makers, despite losing it as a competitive advantage.
So at least some of the reliability for both Toyota and other manufacturers is due to cooperation rather than competition.
It's called Macro-blocking, and it happens when you have noise on the line (or ingress). Basically, your DBmv levels need to be within range with the QAM SNR levels between 31 and 36 db.
If you've got a Scientific Atlanta box running the SARA OS, this is easy to check. First, tune to a digital channel. On the front of the box, hold down the select button until you see a flashing messaging or envelope LED. Let go, and then press the Info key. Pages 1 and 5 will tell you what's important regarding your signal.
Some tips:
1. Don't run more than three splitters in a series.
2. ALWAYS run the patch cable from the wall to your cable box FIRST. Never run it through a DVD or VHS player. Doing so will jack with two-way signal communications.
3. All of your patch cables in the house should be RG6. RG59 is not very well shielded and in fact can act like an antenna. As such, the cable infrastructure should all be RG6 throughout your house.
Note: I'm a former Time Warner Cable of Austin, TX technician.
Life is not for the lazy.
I had Adelphia in Cleveland, Ohio, and it was okay (not great, but respectable). For a while after Time Warner took over (while my cable modem still had a DNS name from adelphia.net), the internet connection was okay. The night my DNS name changed to rr.com (or whatever it was), it came to a screeching halt. I got rid of them real fast. The lady I was talking to when I called to disconnect asked if I had a technician come out to look at it, and I calmly and politely explained that until the switch from adelphia.net to rr.com, everything was fine and dandy. After that, it took close to 30 seconds for my "main sites" folder to open (about 20 of my web sites I visit multiple times per day/night). Now, with my new provider, it takes about 5-10. And it doesn't take forever for a normal web page to come up.
If I still had Time Warner, and I was GUARANTEED the bandwidth that I PAY FOR, then I'd have no problem. But since they can't even do that now, then my answer would be a calm and polite no.
Peace, Chris
Welcome to the world of wired communications. Judging by your comment, it sounds like you've never had a dialup or DSL connection. While typical dialup problems were noise on the line, the world of DSL is (was) a fun one. I provisioned DSL circuits for a regional (Maine through virginia / East coast) ISP back in the late 90's. We would often spend months trying to get Covad/Northpoint/NAS to get Verizon to install circuits, only to learn that either the loop was too long, or that the line was poor quality and they wouldn't install a new one. Often, it'd be ridiculous things like Verizon installing the line at the wrong building, or wrong floor, or the tech was scared of a dog and didn't install it. Some people don't realize how good things have gotten lately since the cable companies have taken the bulk of broadband control.
I work for a DSL company now and we still have issues with Verizon. Their own personnel aver that they are NO LONGER MAINTAINING THEIR OWN COPPER AT ALL. Their only push is FIOS. They deliver circuits perfectly and right after the metallic loop tests they foul the line before leaving the premises to mess with us. They close line orders without ever delivering the loops. They make us pay above and beyond the delivery charge for three successive trouble tickets, each one being escalated two or three times, just to get ONE responsible tech to call in from the premises and do a proper acceptance test.
They still interrupt our services at random and often play games with demarcation judgements, sometimes delivering to extended demarcs and other times only to MPOE and yet at the same time claiming control of internal wiring from MPOE to extended demarc and refusing us access to do the wiring they refuse to do themselves and state is our responsibility. Verizon has ZERO fear of legal reprocussions either criminally or civilly and make no mistake, another administration of Democrats would make no difference over the present Republicans. The propensity of this government no matter who is in power is to let Ma Bell drag her big dead arse out of the grave and shake her booty ominously at the consumer, threatening to sit on them and crush the interest in broadband right out of them.
The cable companies are far from perfect, but I've never gotten such value and attention to overall package evolution as from my cable company. They've kneecapped the local telco with 15x2Mbps cable modem service long long before they even get all the regulatory approval for new fiber infrastructure build-out (by the time the telco gets all the construction stuff out of way, the already in-place cable system need only have a few upgrades to existing equipment to kick me to better than 50Mbps each way), they deliver on TV where the phone company uses a DBS company I once worked for (and learned from inside to despise for their utter mediocrity), and they deliver to me high quality phone service with all the bells and whistles for a fraction of what the telco gives me.
By the way, back in the 90s they weren't Verizon, they were Bell Atlantic North or Bell Atlantic South still up until 2000 or so. We just called them BA-North or more often BS.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
-- I have monkeys in my pants.
According to the book Peopleware, engineers left to themselves provide higher quality than customers are willing to pay for. When competition comes, managers crack down and force engineers to cut quality down to just above the point that drives customers away.
(Peopleware says that in software, this is ultimately more expensive than letting developers work to their on standards of quality. That doesn't apply in this situation, though.)
Verizon : upload 85kb/sec / regular ass little phone cord...
Cable guy: upload 45kb/sec / stapled big thick black coax cable to brand new painted white wood, effectively ruining it, and cabled right across my removable radiator cover, rendering it unremovable.
At least this time he didn't pull out one of those 2 foot long drills and drill a hole straight through the wall like they usually do.
But Verizon actually gave up on their install at my new place.... so.
Don't get me wrong they are all evil megacorporations........
music lover since 1969