Road Runner Cable Modem - Part 1

by Merle Nicholson, President, Tampa PC Users Group

I finally got the telephone call I’ve been waiting months for from Road Runner saying they’re ready in my area. They asked if I’d be willing to serve as a beta tester and could they install next Tuesday? You bet they could. That day was just three days ago as I write this. So my experience is limited, and I’ll be following up with more next month as I gain experience. But I’ve learned a lot of details about what it is–and is not–that I’d like to share.

First a little background in case you’ve not heard about it at all. The Time Warner Cable Company wants to be your Internet service provider, and they want to bring the connection into your house along with the TV signal at an extraordinary speed far exceeding anything a dial-up modem will do. The cost to the customer is just $40 a month for an existing cable subscriber. The normal installation cost is $100 a month but just $50 for members of our club.

The data signal comes in on your TV cable. The catch is that the strength of the signal must meet some standards that are not necessarily required by your TV sets. Mine did not, and when that’s the case they beef up what is necessary to bring it to cable modem standards. So they schedule a TV installer at the same time as the cable modem/software installer. If for instance the signal strength at the pole outside is good, and by the time it reaches your TV set it’s not good, they’ll run a new cable in. Your TV may not care too much, but the modem will. A friend of mine a mile south of me is getting one too, and they ran a new cable in just for the cable modem because the existing interior cable just was too old. In my case, Time-Warner brought in a new cable for me five years ago to service a bedroom and my computer room. So I had a TV and VCR in one room on a good cable. He did replace the splitter and short jumper cables to the outlets to improve that part, and then replaced a cable that ran around the room. He wasn’t happy with my 25 feet store-bought variety. He said his was much better quality. All this is included in the cost.

He wasn’t at all happy with the signal strength after he was done, but the problem was on their end at the pole, and they scheduled repair people to come out and do that the same day. That was done, and in the process improved the quality of one TV set that was a bit snowy on some channels.

The cable is plugged into a box that looks like a 1985 model 2400-baud modem. It's big, about 7x3x11 inches. It has a power cube about the size of my regular modem. Fortunately the cube uses a power cord, so it doesn’t eat up a power strip. He installs a Network Interface Card (NIC) in the computer - a nice little 3-com 10 PCI Ethernet card. There’s a short standard network cable patching between the modem and the PC.

I just found out today from Michael Solomon of TWC that the modem doesn’t like being turned off more than two hours, so he asked me to plug it into something always turned on. They’re monitoring the data rate and lot of other performance things remotely to make sure my service stays good. They can tell if my modem is misbehaving. It was, so he called me and I reset it for him while he was monitoring.

I already have browser and e-mail software. The only thing to do is install the software support for the NIC, configure that to use TCP/IP and install the Road Runner login software. Then set Internet Explorer and Outlook Express to use the Road Runner proxy servers. All this Ty Abrahams of Groupware International did for me while he was at my house. This part went pretty smoothly considering that I’m running a local-area network in my house and the two NICs-his and mine didn’t want to coexist. So I disabled my network and plugged the modem in my own NIC just to make sure everything was working. I’ve since restored my LAN, and everything is running perfectly.

Fortunately I had already gone to IE4.0, which handles multiple e-mail accounts. So I’m continuing to access my GTE e-mail account through Road Runner. I’ll start notifying all my e-mail buds of my new address-merlenic@tampabay.rr.com, for the next month, and I’ll be ready to drop the GTE account.

The Road Runner software is just to log onto the system as far as I can tell. It comes on one diskette, and during the installation it connected for the first time and did a very fast download of some software, and Ty very quickly stopped the download as it began downloading Internet Explorer 4.0. All this leaves you with one small login program to run on startup called Login, with a picture of the Warner Brothers' Road Runner on it. When you run the login program, a very simple panel comes up with a place to type the login name and password and press the Login button.

Now the silly stuff. As it logs on, it plays that Road Runner sound thing that cartoon Road Runners make and then runs Internet explorer for you. The sound was funny once or twice, but after that I wanted it to go away. And I just don’t want IE to launch. Usually I do e-mail first, but most of the time I just want to connect, and do nothing until I’m ready. Ty said that the login really just wants to run something and it doesn’t matter what. And it’s configurable. The other annoying thing is that it doesn’t save the password. It has to be typed in every time. Jeez. I guess in the overall scheme of things, say, compared to weapons inspections in Iraq, it’s not important. But Jeez … guys! Obviously I’m not the only person who thinks this way because there’s a freeware program called QuickRR that fixes all that. The annoying beep-beep gets replaced by a .wav file that plays … silence. And the program that gets run does … nothing. And it remembers my password! And then the login program goes away completely.

Now to the last thing. Accounts. They pick one for you. It’s made up of your first initial, some of your last name and one number, limited to 8 characters. So mine is … well you don’t need to know, because I’m not using it. You do need to log on under that "primary" account to go to the customer Account management on their web site. There you can create four more accounts, login and e-mail. Make up your own. This is good. I did have problems getting into the account management-failed, no access rights, so I sent e-mail, and then called next day. But it took until late that night to resolve it. I sent the help desk e-mail describing the problem again and to my surprise, about 11 PM I got mail back with a setting in my browser to try. It worked. The help desk is open from 8AM to midnight. Very good.

Have I mentioned that it’s FAST ?? How about a 1.6MB download in about 8 seconds? It’s F.A.S.T.

More next month. u