Birds-Eye.Net High Speed Upgrade Challenges

High Speed Upgrade Challenges
High speed upgrades paying price for installation short cuts made in the past.

By: Bruce Bahlmann - Contributing Author (your feedback is important to us!)

Today, many high-speed boomers (customers added during heyday of dialup users flocking to broadband) are experiencing speed caps that have nothing to do with their provisioned cable modem speeds, shared network congestion, or back office manipulation of their traffic – rather their speed obstacle resides between their computer and the cable modem. As competitive pressures (such as FiOS) have prompted cable operators to increase their service speeds, a number of customers have fallen victim to these speed caps which appear as hardware obstacles set in place during their initial installation that prevent them from realizing more recent increases to their service speeds.

These hardware obstacles are the result of installation practices and equipment selections dating back between late 90’s and early 2000’s when decisions were made to either simplify installs or keep equipment costs low by using USB, wireless (802.11x) connections, or even older 10-Base-T connectivity between a customer’s computer and the supplied cable modem. Table 1.0 breaks down the availability of high speed computer connections and identifies the most troubled connection types. Those listed in Red are already limiting connection speeds, where as those listed in Yellow are nearly limiting and those in green still have some room to grow or are not limiting in the foreseeable future.

Connection Type:	Year Introduced:	Theoretical Throughput:	Actual Throughput:
USB 1.0	1996 (January)	1.5 Mbps	Up to 1.5 Mbps*
USB 1.1	1998 (September)	12 Mbps	Up to 6-8 Mbps*
USB 2.0	2000 (April)	480 Mbps	Up to 480 Mbps*
10-Base-T	1990	10 Mbps	Up to 8 Mbps
10/100-Base-T	1995	100 Mbps	Up to 80 Mbps**
10/100/1000-Base-T	1998	1000 Mbps	Up to 800 Mbps**
802.11a	1999 (October)	54 Mbps	Up to 23 Mbps
802.11b	1999 (October)	11 Mbps	Up to 5Mbps
802.11g	2003 (June)	54 Mbps	Up to 20-22 Mbps
802.11n	2009 (June)	300 Mbps	Up to 74 Mbps

Table 1.0 Availability of High Speed Computer Connectivity Methods

* USB is further limited by contention with other devices daisy chained off a given port.
** Some 10/100 and 10/100/1000 NICs may have been user configured to 10Mbps and will need to be changed to either auto-sense (preferred) or the highest rate that the card supports.

In response to these hardware obstacles, cable operators are adopting new installation policies such as attempting to install a 10/100/1000 NIC in the customer’s computer first, and only as a last resort use USB 2.0 type modems.

How did this happen? Well, consider early cable modem service was only 1.5Mbps/300kbps so a 10-Base-T connection didn’t appear limiting where as more expensive 10/100-Base-T interfaces may have seemed excessive. As new customer additions increased, cable operators looked for ways to simplify installs such as use USB cable modems or wireless connections which didn’t require their technicians to crack open customer computers to install NICs – a savings of up to 15-20 minutes per install.

Not all of the speed caps have been self-inflicted. For example, some Consumer Electronics (CE) manufacturers of CableHome gateways are also speed traps. Netgear and Linksys gateways holding the CableHome 1.0 certification stamp have hardware and firmware issues that limit their throughput to 12-13Mbps.

Moving ahead to service speeds above 50Mbps or those above 100Mbps, certainly provided operators with fewer choices in connecting their customer computers to their network but the pains in resolving these remaining speed caps should make them more cautious – potentially to error on the high side rather than what is simpler or less costly.