A new option is available to those who want faster off-campus connection to the Internet, with the announcement that Time-Warner Cable will offer its Road Runner service in Ithaca.
But Road Runner will not give users the same access to campus network services as the university's dial-up EZ-Remote service, Cornell Information Technologies representatives caution.
The Road Runner service, expected to go online in mid-October, offers subscribers access to the Internet over television cable wiring. It has been available for some time in Syracuse, Rochester and Elmira, but its introduction in Ithaca has been delayed until the system could be upgraded with new fiber-optic lines, company officials said.
Road Runner joins several other Internet services available or soon to come online in Tompkins County. A service called Telergy will offer high-speed access over existing telephone lines using Consumer Digital Subscriber Line (CDSL) technology, and Bell Atlantic is conducting trials of a similar service called Asynchronous Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL).
Several local Internet service providers (ISPs) also offer ADSL and ISDN connections over phone lines, as well as with regular dial-up connections via modem. Meanwhile, Cornell Information Technologies is upgrading its high-speed EZ-Remote option to use 56K modems.
CIT has posted an explanatory discussion on these and possible future services, including a Q and A, on the web at http://www.cit.cornell.edu/ncs/tsed/tsedpg1.html.
Time-Warner says its Road Runner service will provide much faster access to the Internet than connecting with a telephone modem, and it offers the advantage that it will not tie up the phone. It also will not interfere with cable reception, the company says.
Just how fast the service really will be depends on a number of variables.
Time-Warner's wiring is capable of carrying signals at up to 28 megabits/second (Mb/sec), said Mike Munley, the company's vice president of business development. That's almost three times as fast as most campus Internet connections. However, Munley said, the cable modem the company installs in the customer's home can only handle a speed of 10 Mb/sec, or about the speed most on-campus users see. After that, he said, the speed of data transfer depends on the capability of the network card installed in the computer and the clock speed of the computer itself.
To cover all the bases, the company just advertises the system as "100 times faster than a 28.8K modem," Munley said.
"Upstream" signals from your computer to the net travel at a slower top speed -- 765 kilobits per second -- but that shouldn't be a problem for most users. The theory is that most users will just be typing in a URL or sending a short e-mail message. It's when you're downloading web pages with large graphics that you need the speed.
All this comes with the caveat that Road Runner is a "shared system." Incoming information from the Internet travels at very high speed to a neighborhood "node," from which up to 500 subscribers are served via coaxial cable. If you're the only person on your node using the service, you may get very fast downloads, but if a lot of your neighbors are online at the same time, things may slow down. If demand increases, Munley said, the company has the capability of upgrading the system to cut the number of subscribers on a node down to 250.
Speed isn't the only thing to consider in choosing a service, said Martyne Hallgren, assistant director of CIT Network and Computing Systems. Road Runner users will be outside Cornell's Internet domain, and some Bear Access services, in particular library services, won't be accessible to them, she said.
When you connect to the Cornell system via a modem, using Bear Access and EZ-Remote, your computer becomes just another machine on the campus network. It's assigned a string of numbers called an "IP address" that tells other computers you belong to the Cornell domain. It's sort of like putting on a special robe at a lodge meeting: everyone knows you're an insider, and they're not afraid to tell you secrets.
"We had people try out the [Road Runner] system in Syracuse and Elmira," Hallgren said, "and they could not access some Bear Access services." There have been no tests with the Ithaca system, she emphasized, because it isn't in place yet.
Because the "upstream" capacity is quite small and must be shared, the Road Runner system is deliberately set up to limit upstream signals, according to CIT engineer Kevin Feeney. This means Road Runner users will not be able to run web, FTP and other types of servers out of their homes, as many students do on Resnet, Feeney said, noting that this applies to "our understanding of the service as currently offered."
Contrary to some reports, Munley said, Road Runner subscribers will not be able to use the service to connect directly to Cornell or any other Internet service provider. Some confusion may have resulted from the statement that users may connect directly to services like America Online and Compuserve via Road Runner or any other Internet service providers, Munley said.
The Road Runner service will be available only in areas that have been upgraded by Time-Warner with new fiber-optic cables. As a rule of thumb, if you can receive cable channels 65-73, you are in an upgraded area. More information is available on the company's web site at http://www.twcny.rr.com.
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