[TriLUG] RE: broadband in the Triangle area

[Steve Williams]

>From the looks of it, the modem rental deduction is only available to RR
subscribers, reference:

http://www.twcnc.com/road_runner/pricing.htm
http://www.twcnc.com/earthlink/pricing.htm

And its only $3 per month.  For my money, $3 seems a low price to pay when
TWC is gonna replace the thing if it goes bad, gets a bad firmware upgrade
(has happened), power supply fails, etc.  There are no performance or even
"hackability" advantages to owning your own modem (hacked modems can be
detected very easily no matter what the vendor).

Any DOCSIS 1.0 modem "should" work - though TWC maintains a separate list of
"tested" and "approved" modems, and most cable divisions (the local offices)
maintain their own subset of those.  Bottom line - best effort support (at
best) is all you can expect for a customer owned modem.  Also remember that
as the cable companies move forward with advanced versions of the DOCSIS
spec, there's no guarantee that your modem will be upgradeable to those
specs - but the ones maintained by the cable company will (or the cable
company will replace it, no charge).

-Steve

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Lance A. Brown" <lance at bearcircle.net>
To: "Triangle Linux Users Group discussion list" <trilug at trilug.org>
Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2003 6:30 PM
Subject: [TriLUG] RE: broadband in the Triangle area


> So, if I were to buy my own modem, what brands/models are recommended?
>
> --[Lance]
>
> On Sun, 2003-08-24 at 12:05, Jeremy Portzer wrote:
> > On Sat, 2003-08-23 at 21:36, Ben Pitzer wrote:
> >
> > > One last thing:  If you decide to go with cable, buy your own cable
modem.
> > > The $5 or so you save every month will pay for that modem in about 1.5
years
> > > or better.
> >
> > Heya Ben,
> > Thanks for all the info.
> >
> > If you do buy your own cable modem, can you actually get the ISPs to
> > refund the "rental" charge?  If so, how do you go about doing that?
> > It's certainly not itemized on my bill (which comes from Time-Warner
> > Cable, even though I have Earthlink service.)
> >
> > --Jeremy
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