 Review by snorpus 
Posted: 9.2 years ago
member for 9.2 years, 1530 visits, last login: 217 days ago
 Export,Westmoreland,PA
 $40 per month
 about 10 days
 "Could have been installed in 8 days, if I could have made the first appointment. My fault!"
 "Installer drilled into return vent, didn't realize that had to remove WinModem to free up an IRQ. had no clue about Linux ."
 "With tweaks, I'm getting >3.6Mbps download on the dslreports tests (off-peak, of course)."
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection Reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
|
9/19/2000: I get an Adelphia-gram in the mail, informing me I can trade in my "old" cable-box for a "new" digital cable box at a local community center. I go down that night, and come home with a bazillion new channels, a digital cable box, and a bill that's $8 lower per month. While there, I agree to sign up for PowerLink (Adelphia's cable modem service) for $40 a month. An appointment to install PowerLink will be scheduled later.
9/20/2000: By the afternoon of the next day, the digital cable service is activated. More movies I won't watch, 45 music channels which my kids say are great, and, just for me, Speedvision.
9/22/2000: Adelphia calls and sets up an appointment to install the cable modem next Wednesday at 3-5pm. I agree.
9/27/2000: I have a meeting at my son's high school, and am 20 minutes late. The cable guy has been and gone. I call Adelphia and re-schedule for Friday, September 29th.
9/29/2000 1500EDT: I'm here, the cable guy is here, let's get it on...
My cable feed runs through the basement, so the installer (unlike some other areas, I have "one guy does all", not separate cable runners and modem/NIC installers) decides to drill down thru the floor next to my computer, and run the RG-59 from there in the basement. I presume this is fairly normal. But he (we) didn't check the other side of the wall, where we would have seen, if we had taken the time to look, that a return vent used the same wall space. So the first hole went into the vent, and the cable never came out the other end.
We do some measurements, determine where to drill to come out in the joist space, and all is well.
Next, we try to install the NIC (a Kingston KNE100TX). The first time he doesn't get it seated correctly, the second time it seats but since its in a previously unused PCI slot, the contacts are dirty (My PC is a Pentium II, over 3 years old), and the third time is a charm. (Hint: if your computer is more than a few months old, seat and re-seat any cards you mount, the contacts could be a bit corroded.) OK, we don't really know the contacts are dirty, but it seems like a reasonable explanation. I've had quantity orders (50) of new PCs delivered where 20% of them had to have cards reseated, so this isn't terribly surprising.
Anyway, we're now up and running, the cable guy runs some tests at www.toast.com, seems OK, so he leaves. Total time on site, including running the cable and getting my workstation up and running in Win98 mode, is about an hour and 15 minutes.
Untweaked download speeds of 1-1.5 Mbps from the dslreports East Coast Server, 0.5-1.0 Mbps from the West Coast Server. Not bad "out of the box", let's see what some Registry tuning can do.
Initially, I ignored the instructions, and just created a new Default Receive Window key, which promptly caused the system to crash on startup. Went back, reread the instructions, identified which of the *four* TCP keys was the right one to monkey with, added all the item-value pairs listed in the Tweaks section, and "voila`".
It works, it works like a champ. Best East Coast download speed has been 3630 Kbps (!), and consistently (during offpeak hours) its been >3000 Kbps. West Coast is usually >2000 Kbps offpeak, and >1000 Kbps peak times. Admittedly, I'm an early adopter, and I'm probably one of the few sharing my node right now, so my download speed might drop as more neighbors get on the system.
Speed Ordered: I don't think Adelphia ever quoted a speed. The upload speed appears to be limited to 128 Kbps (I've never exceeded that). When I record speed measurements in the dslreports database, I've decided to use 4000 as the download speed, but I really don't know for sure what the upper download limit is. The best I've ever gotten is 3650 Kbps, but I don't know, at this point, if that's the very best I can do.
Order/Install Process: If I hadn't missed the first appointment, it would have been in place in 8 days. As it was, it was only 10 days. (I was pro-active, and called Adelphia and apologized for missing the first appointment, which might have helped somewhat.) The tech was reasonably competent, although I think he should have thought of legacy hardware hogging IRQs before I did.
My PC is a Gateway PII 300Mhz, dual booting to Win98 (upgrade from Win95, *not* Win98SE) and Linux/Mandrake. The tech had never heard of Linux, so I thought it best that I just get Win98 running, and I'll figure out the Linux side for myself.
NIC: Kingston KNE100TX (10/100 PnP Ethernet card)
Cable Modem: Terayon DOCSIS ECM110
IP: Dynamic, 3 hour renewable leases... I've been connected for over four days now, and still have the same IP as at the beginning. Maybe these could be called "quasi-dynamic" or "semi-static" IPs.
Other Experiences: Installed BlackICE as soon as I got the cable modem. In four+ days, have had six separate probes, scans, attacks, etc. Reported them to Adelphia, and they very quickly responded via email with a list of items that they need (Attacker IP, probe type, etc.) to follow up on. Too soon to see if they'll be effective, but at least it appears they're trying.
Dave
Update for 10/04/2000
Read some other reviews of Adelphia from other areas, and decided to re-do my speed tests. Couldn't get into the East Coast server at dslreports.com, but the West Coast Server (at 7:45pm EDT) gave me the following results:
Test running..........
** Speed 2420(down)/124(up) kbps **
(At least 48 times faster than a 56k modem)
Logging result
Finish.
I didn't mention in my review, but at least in this area (Western Pennsylvania), Adelphia, AT&T, and Verizon (ex-BellAtlantic) are in a big marketing battle. Verizon just announced a six month free trial for some web services, etc., and AT&T is stringing fiber like mad, at least till their sub-contractors poke into a natural gas line and blow up a neighborhood.
I can't comment on what Adelphia is doing in other parts of the country, but around here, they strung all new hardline and, IMHO, appear to be the system of choice, right now. Technically, I think DSL should be winning, but the telco's seem to be dropping the ball (read all the posts about coordiinating the telco, the dsl company, and the isp).
Dave
Update at 10-04-2000 20:45 EDT
Got into dislreports East Coast server around 8:45pm. Here are the results, copied and pasted into this review addendum...
Test running..........
** Speed 2420(down)/124(up) kbps **
(At least 48 times faster than a 56k modem)
Logging result
Finish.
Followup comments: | Forums » comments on review of Adelphia HSI |
|
Adelphia HSI
(34)