Last month, I related that I was offered the Road Runner cable modem service as a Beta tester. It’s been more than a month on the Road Runner service now. I’ve resolved some problems I had having to do with my own PC setup, and I’ve had a couple of outages on my service that were resolved quickly. I’ve been very happy with the service.

I had kind of a complicated setup in my home. I would guess that most people don’t have a LAN in their home, but I personally know two other families besides my own who do. I wanted to take advantage of my LAN and route the Internet service to both PC’s. I’ve managed to do that satisfactorily by using two Ethernet cards in my own PC, and installing a nice little $50 software package called Sygate. The software part was easy, and after I figured out that I was out of interrupts in my PC, which prevented the LAN Ethernet card and the Cable modem Ethernet card both from working, I resolved it by pulling my PS/2 mouse and reinstalling it to a serial port. That freed up the interrupt ( 12 ) that I needed, and my system was happy again.

That complicated my life some, because I had a docking station for my little electronic Sharp Wizard in that serial port; my modem is in the other, so I had to install an a-b switch so that I could switch between the two. That works well.

I’ve had a couple of short duration outages on the cable modem during the month; the last one was cleared within about three hours after I called it in. I haven’t had any trouble contacting the help desk by phone, and so far they’ve responded to my e-mail almost immediately in the evenings. Even though it’s Beta in my neighborhood (I have to remind myself of that sometimes!) I really haven’t had any more problems than with my conventional GTE service. Time will tell, but it’s very encouraging.

As for performance, I’d say that my browser is pretty easily double the 28.8 that I was getting. E-mail send and receive is fast, newsgroups are pretty much instantaneous once the headers are loaded. Downloads from FTP sites are just amazing. I get a very consistent 30kb/sec, about 15 times faster than my 28.8. Some people report even faster than that.

One concern I had was accessing my e-mail from my office. They have that covered with a regular e-mail server address that’s outside the Road Runner network. That is working very well.

Very highly recommended --Roadrunner Cable ISP service from Time Warner Cable. u