Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

["Lance A. Brown" <labrown AT nc.rr.com>]

Judy Hallman <hallman AT email.unc.edu> writes:

> What about for regular home use? I think I can finally get DSL (got a
> message from Earthlink a couple of days ago saying we can now get it) and
> also TW. I thought I heard that DSL is better -- that cable will get
> slower as it takes more load. I don't want to hap business rates.

This *used* to be the case with cablemodem systems.  The first
implementations were literally a shared LAN configuration.  Everyone
on a cabelmodem segment shared their upload/download bandwidth so if
Bubba next door was downloading MP3s from a fast site YOUR bandwidth
was affected.

This is no longer the case, at least with RoadRunner in the Triangle.
The introduction of DOCSIS-capable cablemodems lets RR easily manage
bandwidth usage and maintain "garranteed" bandwidth offers.  With
DOCSIS, each cablemodem has a configuration stored on a central server
that tells the modem what cable-TV channel to use for upload and
download channels.  When a particular channel becomes saturated, TWC
can just allocate another unused cabel-TV channel, each of which is
approx. 26Mbit of bandwidth, as an upload or download channel, update
the configurations for the affected modems, and the next time those
cabelmodems are reset they get the new configurations.

Basically, as long as TWC has unused Cable-TV channels available they
can grow the cablemodem-allocated bandwidth and maintain throughput.

--[Lance]