[svlug] @Home

[Dave Zarzycki]

On Mon, 16 Nov 1998, S. Fouzi Husaini wrote:

> I went to an @Home demo this weekend in Hayward at a TCI office. From what I
> saw (of course all the PC's in the demo room were running win95) it seemed
> interesting but a bit pricy . They are charging $150 bucks for installation 
> (this seemed way too much) which includes a 3com 10baseT ethernet card, an 
> @Home modem (I have no clue why they call it a modem, because it is NOT) and 
> some other "setup" fees.

That cost will become trivial after you see how fast it is. Also, if you
already have any ethernet card, call them up and convince them to deduct
the cost from the installation. I've heard that this can work, and can cut
the installation fee in half! Also, if you are a Linux user, ask for the
IP address, netmask, router, and DNS servers in advance. Get your machine
as ready as possible. Then, once your installation becomes ultra short (if
cable is already installed in your house), call @Home up again and tell
them this, "The installation people we're amazed at how fast I was able to
get my Linux machine up and running, it took less than a minute. The
install guys also mentioned that an installation typically takes an hour
for Windoz machines, could I get a refund for the time they didn't spend
down here?" While I doubt this will work with @Home, I heard a success
story from a Mac user back east.

> Then you pay a monthly fee of $39.95. I like the 
> idea of not having to mess around with writing fault monitors for my dial in 
> scripts and 10baseT is faster than 56k.

It's worth it. $20 for a "normal" ISP + $16 from the local copper monopoly
(PacBell in my case), is $36. Hmmm... So for an extra $4, you get 10Mbps.
Not bad.

> However their proxy/firewall system 
> makes connecting back into a machine on the @Home intranet a bit of a challenge.

First of all, you don't need to use their caching proxies. I've found them
to be slower than fetching the URL directly, or joining NLANR's cache
hiearchy (If they supported ICP, I would use them, but they don't).

Secondly, the only thing that they seem to firewall these days is SMB
ports, and non IP protocols. To tell the truth, I don't know what the
state of their filtering/firewalling is today. But there was a point in
@Home's history, when you could run IPX or AppleTalk with just about
anybody on your node!

I have a Linux box setup at my parent's place in Fremont for over a year
now, and am quite satisfied with the performance. I run a web, and mail
servers, without any complaint from @Home (ssh too, this is a Un*x box
after all). I heard a rumor that @Home does bandwidth profiling to catch
the abusers of the system, so be careful. @Home's acceptable use policy
does not allow users to run servers on their machine. I know that tons of
people do, like myself, but you are really playing with fire when you do.
My personal rule is this, make sure that you can claim that the servers
that you run are only for your families private use. There is no profit
being made, nor service being offered to the general public. I haven't had
to use this argument yet, but I think it prevents me from doing anything
stupid that might cause @Home to think about dropping my parents as a
customer.

BTW for an extra $5/month/IP address, you can get two addition IP address.
And unless @Home has changed their network design for new communities,
these are DHCP/bootp free, always available IP address.

> What I did find was cool was when I had exhausted the technical resources of
> the Compac consultant they had on hand at the demo and they refered me to a
> tech-support line the guy I got to talk with was a LINUX user! I thought that
> was pretty cool.

That's good to know.

> well, anyway, the @Home folks said that they have been servicing Fremont for 2
> years now. are there any SVLUG Fremontians out there using this service? What
> about anyone else? 

Yes, like I said, I have a Linux box at my parent's place, it does IP
masq. and offers a few services to my family (@Home doesn't have enough
e-mail address for it to be worth while to my parents and my siblings).
Mind you that 24x7x365 uptime is tough to handle for such a large network,
and on rare occasion, you have an outage. My personal experiances with
these outages is that they are very frustrating when they happen, but at
$40/month for 10Mbps, you can't complain much. If I were to make a rough
approximation of @Home's uptime rating, it would be greater than 99.9%. On
the flip side of that is over 61 thousand hours of 10Mbps connectivity
every year.

Now to dispell the rumors of poor performance that ADSL fans like to make.
Every so often, I do the "netscape test," which involves downloading
netscape from netscape's ftp servers. I'll typically get anywhere from
300KB/s to 700KB/s. In other words, that's 2.5Mbps to 5.7Mbps. Not bad for
a shared medium. What most people don't realize, and the telecom/typical
ISP hasn't realized, is that for all these years, people have been
transmitting data to and from the internet through a thin straw. so of
course people are going to be online for a long time, it takes forever to
accomplish anything! The copper monopoly and ISPs presume that with higher
bandwidth, a consumer's thirst to suck data down the pipe with scale
linearly. This is not true. Only a warez or porno site's demand scales
with available bandwidth. If your not hosting a popular web site for the
public at large, your bandwidth consumption is trivially higher than your
modem counterpart. You just spend a lot more time idle on the wire, and
less time downloading.

All in all, I would recommend getting it, if you can play by @Home's
rules. If you want to suck bandwidth, or host a web or ftp site, get DSL.

davez


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