One Down, One to Go

Well, am halfway through my conversion ordeal. About noon yesterday the Time Warner folks showed up. Took them about 45 minutes to do the install, which helped me to understand why they couldn't let me do a self-install. They ended up replacing all the connectors, and ran a new line to the house as well as dropping in a DOSCIS 3.0 modem.

Given that it was alternating raining and just cloudy yesterday I suppose I'm not too surprised they didn't bury the new line. It is running through several of our bushes, and as a bright orange color is more than a little distracting. I suppose that is another call I will have to make next week to make sure someone is planning to come back and bury it.

The modem itself looks like someone told Time Warner that the "distressed look" is in. While the LCD display panel and the lights are ok, the black covering looks like it had been beaten and cut up in a turf war. I can only hope that doesn't mean I can expect it to go out soon. SpeedTest results aren't bad, although they are significantly less than the promised speeds of 20 with bursts up to 30 (best SpeedTest result so far is a 14). However sustained throughput is between 3-4 times faster than Clear meaning I can actually steam a 720p video with minimal hiccups. DLs aren't much worse than waiting through a commercial break, and there was none of the usual 0.5 speeds at night I had to get used to with Clear (can you say oversubscribed service?). Also had a little fun getting it to work with my home network. The installers were nice enough to make sure the included WiFi was not turned on (which would have caused major interference), but the modem comes set at 192.168.0.1 as the default, which was the same as my Linksys Router. Modem also comes with DHCP set to on, so the ultimate solution was to drop the Static IP on my one system, and then set the Linksys to 192.168.10.1 so that everything on "my" side of the connection is in a different sub-network.

Part of the upgrade yesterday was also setting up a new Acer AspireRevo AR3700-U3002 to replace the WDTV HD Live downstairs. I actually had to convince my wife it was a real computer since it's so small and quiet. But it did mean I can finally have the 4TB drive downstairs again (the last WDTV firmware upgrade caused their units to stop talking to the drive and I tried both I have), as well as support the 10-bit MP4 codec that is the latest in the fansub community. Have to say that Nisemonogatari looks great on a 42 inch 1080p screen.

Just to let you know the latest :-)