AT&T was offering the first three months at $9.95 a month, with free premium installation, and a 30-day money-back guarantee. I called and asked some questions—like what equipment I needed (a network card)—and ordered. The appointment was only five days ahead, so over the weekend I went to Fry's and bought a Linksys 10/100 net card. With the rebate, assuming it's honored, the card was only $10.
The installer showed up promptly, near the beginning of the time window AT&T Cable had given me. He was an intelligent young man, born in Vietnam, who's been a contractor to the cable company for a number of years, installing and setting up cable modems. He was glad to hear I'd already installed the NIC (network interface card) card, because it saved him significant time, and he gets paid by the installation. He quickly set to work connecting the RCA cable modem. He put a splitter on the cable TV line in my office, then ran it to the cable modem. Then he set up a LAN (local area network) connection on my computer, and phoned the office to get an IP address and default gateway. These would provide my address on the Internet.
He got a set of numbers, hung up, and entered the numbers. But he couldn't connect with those numbers. He called in and was told he'd have to wait 30 minutes. While we waited, he explained that AT&T Broadband Cable only had two people in the office supporting 25 installers, and the installers frequently had to wait to get the information they needed to complete a job. When he called in again and asked for a working set of numbers, he was told, "I don't have time to get that one working." He was told to leave without finishing the job and tell me to call the office to complain and get the job finished.
Fortunately, my installer ignored it and used the AT&T software CD to install. Now he had to configure my system to get an IP address automatically when I connected, rather than have an assigned IP address. The DNS server addresses would also be obtained automatically, rather than be assigned. Then we had to wait for more information from the cable company. Somewhere along the way I lost track of what he was calling in for this time—I just wanted to get it working so I could get back to working.
Finally the job was completed. I was connected to the Internet, and everything seemed to work fine.
Over the next two weeks, I began to appreciate the increase in speed. In a conversation with Don Frieze, our treasurer and another cable modem subscriber, I found that my connection might not be configured for optimum speeds. Don told me about a fix he'd found that gave him increased speed, and that he'd shared with Roy Korb, our longtime associate shareware librarian. Roy sent it to me, and although it turned out to be for Windows 98 (I run Windows 2000), it gave me enough information to find one for my system. It was an MTU fix—a change in the registry entries for Maximum Transmission Unit, and I think some other values. The end result is that the fix allows your system to receive data in bigger, and thus more efficient, chunks. It can sometimes make an astounding difference in the speed of your system.
I searched on Google and found a pointer to Speedguide, a site dedicated to helping broadband users speed up their connections. A click on "Win2K Tweaks" found me a registry file for Windows 2000. I can't be sure it speeded me up, but the speed I got was pretty impressive.
Just as I began to really enjoy the ATT@Home service, I started hearing about the well-publicized problems of Excite@Home, and the potential disconnect looming for Nov 30. Sure enough, on Dec 1 the connection disappeared. Fortunately, I hadn't removed my dial-up modem, so I used that while I waited for AT&T to restore service. On Dec 5 I got the automated call I'd been waiting for: instructions on how to activate the new connection. I did it immediately, and fortunately for me, I didn't have the problems described elsewhere in this issue by Dennis Richardson. My connection worked!
Well, sort of. I had strange problems with e-mail. Much of the day I couldn't send e-mail, and part of the time I couldn't retrieve it. I couldn't get to Web sites, either. I think the problem was because I couldn't reach the AT&T DNS servers which provide the addresses for Web sites. I suffered through a week of terrible connections thinking I'd give them a chance to fix the problem since I was paying so little. But the need to disconnect the cable modem and use my dial-up while AT&T crowed to the press that they had "successfully" converted their customers to their own network, was finally enough to convince me to use the 30-day money-back guarantee.
I called AT&T and had the account terminated. Miraculously, using the dial-up modem restored my whole system. E-mail worked properly and I could connect to Web sites. I've been monitoring a newsgroup that deals with cable service (news:comp.dcom.modems.cable), and it appears there are many thousands of victims…I mean customers…of AT&T who still suffer with rotten service.
Cable modems were the hope of many homes that can't reach DSL. Only time will tell if they are able to restore the trust, and the quality of service, that have been lost.
