CAI, 2nd installation

[richb at pioneer.ci.net (Rich Braun)]

Following on the heels of Mark Dulcey's installation, I had mine set up.
Here's a report on how CAI performed:

* They took the order verbally last Wednesday, and arranged for the RF
  antenna to be put up on less than 48 hours' notice.  A team of two
  showed up in a jury-rigged van Friday morning at 9:15, climbed up on
  my roof in Davis Square, Somerville, hooked up a square antenna not
  quite a foot across on an ordinary chimney mount and ran RG-6 cable
  down the side of the house into the basement next to my cat-5 patch panel.
* They vanished around 10:30, saying I had "good signal" into their
  1 Financial POP (that's the 41-story white building across from South
  Station) and indicating that the router guy should show up sometime later
  that day.
* Friday came & went, and on Monday afternoon I called in to learn that
  my order paperwork wasn't immediately present.  An installer called from
  the field an hour or so later, and said he'd be by in half an hour.
* At about 4:45 Monday, technician Larry Garlad showed up with the "Surfboard"
  model SB1100 cable modem made by General Instrument.  Two minutes of
  hooking things up in the basement, followed by ten minutes of conniptions
  with my Win95 box (the new IP address barfed on the LAN with my old
  Ascend router hooked up), and I was up and running.  Larry stayed for a
  total of about 30 minutes.
* The SB1100 comes with an internal modem and a web interface.  The installer
  configures it with the pseudo-address 192.168.100.1, and you can then
  fill in a nominal set of info to connect to a PPP server.  Theirs is
  in the 617-531-xxxx prefix.
* You get a static IP address in one of their class-C blocks.  Inverse
  DNS isn't configured at this point, which is inconvenient when trying to
  connect to certain servers out there (e.g. ftp.uu.net rejects my attempts).
  I'll see if they'll point it to one of my domains.
* Performance is over 10x my old 128K ISDN connection.  I get a consistent
  160K bytes/second (about 83% of a T1, better than I usually get on a
  T1) when doing an ftp from my old standby wizard.pn.com; I also
  tried a few other hosts at this busy Monday afternoon hour:  tsx-11.mit.edu,
  115K; www.caiwireless.net, 47K; ftp.zdnet.com, 68K.  The 128K ISDN
  connection tops out at 15K.  These speeds are observed using QVT/Net's
  ftp client on a Win95 box using either the PPP server supplied by CAI or
  the ISDN server at my old ISP; I didn't see much difference.  The
  benchmarks were done using gzipped files; compression isn't a factor.

  Note again that the return path is separate from the microwave technology;
  they don't have 2-way service implemented at this time.  That's why they
  have a PPP server.  You need a phone line or other ISP service in conjunction
  with the RF antenna.
* CAI's DNS server configured by the tech on my box was down at the time.
  Not impressive from a technical standpoint.  This was causing long
  timeouts doing lookups on web pages, until I switched DNS servers.  (The
  secondaries they supply are cache servers at UUNET.)  After fixing this,
  I was able to zip through the boston.com web pages detailing the latest
  stock-market meltdown...
* The tech also had to apologize for the fact that my PPP and POP3 logins
  weren't yet configured; he explained that the back-office folks weren't
  aware he was able to dispatch this installation today, after noting that
  he "wasn't surprised" that the logins were yet to be configured.
* CAI does not have a standard customer config checksheet; I asked the
  tech for a copy of the sheet he uses.  It has most of the info but he
  is under management instructions not to give out the phone/email contact
  info on the top of the sheet (he tore off that part of my copy).  This
  part of the service could stand some polishing.  Indeed, at this point
  I'm not sure exactly how I'm supposed to request customer service, or
  exactly what services I should expect.  The sheet shows DNS, POP3, and
  netnews addresses, along with the dialup number of a PPP server.

I'll find time the next few days to get the Linux box configured as a
masquerade gateway.  Looks to me like inbound packets will go to the
Linux box in the 208.221.212.xx network and get routed to a
192.168.x.x net I assign for the PC's, and outbound packets will go
through the 192.168.100.1 address they assigned to the Ethernet port
on the General Instruments box.  I can set up the Linux box as a
caching DNS server and ignore the DNS server problems at the ISP.

The tech reported that they're doing "a lot of these" installations;
the operation seems to be getting a rough start.  Even so, though,
T1-speed service at $50/month (plus a $20 phone line) is going to
attract a *lot* of customers.  The RF antenna's free, the router's
free, and installation's something like $100 (I don't remember--in
point of fact, I haven't been billed yet!)  Wearing my hat as former
ISP, I don't know *how* they can make money doing this but thus far
the technology performs as they claim.  If the financial community is
as willing to foot the infrastructure bill as it was in the early days
of cable TV (remember the $4/month cable TV service, with free
installation, circa 1983?), then I suppose we'll be seeing literally
millions of these freebie Internet routers installed across the land.

CAI's geographic coverage area is undoubtedly much broader than that of
any of the cable Internet services in the region.  They can tap into any
of three POPs (Boston, Needham, Peabody), and finding a signal from any
of these is a matter of extending the pole on their van and sniffing
around for a couple of minutes.

I'm glad to see the cable guys have competition.  Hopefully among the
myriad players, at least one of them figures out customer service.

-rich