Internet Service in Knoxville, TN

When I moved from Cortland, NY to Knoxville, TN, a metropolitan area with a population about twenty times that of Cortland's, a major university, and nearby a large national research laboratory, I assumed the situation would surely be better with respect to Internet access. The answer is: yes and no. Basically, I can see the paving crew working their way up to my house, but they're not here yet.

Update: The paving crew has reached my house, and I have entered the 20th century: I have cable modem data service and cable television. See below for more info.

• At my new house, I can't get a dial-up connection better than 28.8 Kbps because of the "antiquated" local loop connecting me to the central office. When I reported this problem, Bell South Customer Service responded that they only guaranteed 19.2 Kbps (one person said 9.6 Kbps). But they did run a line test and determine that the line was not up to snuff, so they sent out a technician. The guy they sent was extremely friendly and helpful. Of course he knew the standard company bull about guaranteed rates, but he agreed it was pretty ridiculous. He told me that there were several different systems operating in my area. He could move me to another system, but they were all old and he doubted any of them would give me better performance. Nevertheless, he took his laptop and tried all of them for me and reported back. His guess was right -- none of the other systems he could hook me up with were any better -- but I really appreciate his willingness to try.
• Interestingly, I'm told I can get ISDN service, though I remain somewhat skeptical given the above information. While not cheap, the service is not ridiculously priced. ISDN essentially gives you two lines for something like $35/mo whereas two analog POTS (plain old telephone service) lines cost me about $26/mo (plus all the taxes in both cases). Also remember that your ISP is going to charge you more for ISDN service than for regular dialup -- typically a $10/mo premium from what I've seen. At least in Bell South-land they're not slapping per-minute charges on data calls, like they do in NY. That's discriminatory (they don't charge them on voice calls) and seems self-defeating of attempts to sell ISDN for "high-speed" data access. But of course critics of the telecom industry have been saying for years that the telcos really have no interest in selling ISDN. I'll consider getting ISDN but I think there's a more promising opportunity becoming available soon -- read on.
• DSL service is not available to me, and I could find no one who would admit to Bell South having any kind of deployment plan which might provide a clue as to whether it was worth waiting for. I suppose they walk into work each morning and throw darts at a map to decide which central office or local loop they're going to make DSL-ready that day. Using DSLReports I was able to determine that I'm more than 35,000 feet from the Central Office. Most DSL service can run 12,000-15,000 feet from the CO. There's supposedly an IDSL technology that can run to 35,000 feet, but it gives only ISDN speeds, and it not widely used. So why couldn't Bell South just say that DSL service will not be available for the foreseeable future? Why did they always encourage me to call back in a month and see if things had changed? Its clearly not going to change until they build a new CO, and that doesn't happen in a month. Annoying is an understatement.
• As of May 2001, I'm online with Comcast@Home cable modem service!

  I started inquiring about this shortly after I moved to Knoxville in the fall of 2000, and was told it was "in the works." Originally, they were planning to start by deploying "hybrid" service where the cable modem is used for the downstream channel, but dialup is still used for the upstream, and would upgrade to full-duplex on the cable in the future. More recently, I learned that at least in West Knoxville, they found they could go straight to full-duplex, so that was their plan. In February 2001, I was told that they were working on my area and it should be ready for customers by early March. When I inquired again at the beginning of May, I was told they'd just completed my area a week ago and I made an installation appointment immediately.

  So now I'm online. A spot check of the line performance right after installation, and with no tuning of a standard Linux distribution said I was getting about 1.7 Mb/s downstream and 1.0 Mb/s upstream. I'm pretty sure I'm the first on my block, so it will be interesting to see how long this holds. My (rented) RCA DCM225 cable modem is connected to a LinkSys BEFW11S4 router/firewall to protect my systems from the big nasty Internet. The cool thing about this is that the BEFW11S4 has a built-in IEEE 802.11b wireless access point, which I can use with my work laptop when I bring it home.

  And a couple of notes about pricing... Comcast charges $10 more per month for data service if you don't have cable TV service (which we didn't). However they have a $7.95/mo cable TV plan that offers just the local channels, and that's sufficient for them to give you the lower charge for the data service. Other places I've lived insisted that you had to spend $20-30/mo on their "basic" service with 60-100 stations of drivel instead of 12 before they'd lower the price of their data services. And I'm actually interested in the cable version of the local channels, because this is a pretty hilly area, and reception with rabbit ears is not great. The other point of info is that the modem nominally rents for $7/mo or can be purchased from Comcast for $200. I couldn't find the modem cheaper anywhere else, though several people have made vague claims of having seen it for ~$150. Of course they can't remember where, and they decided not to buy... I'm renting too, for the time being. Who knows what might happen in the two years it would take to pay back the outright purchase.

  For other Knoxvillians: I've heard of two other cable companies which don't service my area now, but claim to be headed in that direction: Charter Communications and Knology. Knology wants to do your telephone, television, and data service all on the same wire.

Knoxville-Area ISPs

• ICX Online was my ISP until I got cable modem service. They offer relatively inexpensive service and used to offer good connectivity to work (see the note about RITE, below). So far I haven't had any problems with busy signals; a couple of times I've gotten an "all circuits are busy" from the phone company but redialing immediately resulted in a connection every time. That could be the phone company or the ISP being busy (if the ISP is on a "choke" prefix, as used by radio stations for call-in contests & such).

Regional Internet Traffic Exchange (RITE)

This is a Knoxville-area internet traffic exchange point. Members of RITE should have pretty good connectivity among themselves because it avoids the need to send packets to one of the major exchange points (MAE-East, MAE-West or the NJ NAP) to get from one network to another. My employer (ORNL) and my wife's employer (UT Knoxville) are members. When I signed on with them, my then-ISP (ICX) was also a member, but they have since dropped it saying that they see no value in it. This is most unfortunate, and is probably enough to motivate me to change ISPs.

Local vs National ISPs

In my previous musings/rantings on Cortland internet service, I lamented the fact that none of the national ISPs had POPs in Cortland. That's certainly not the case in Knoxville, so why didn't I go with a national ISP this time so as to be able to make local connections when I travel? I'm not sure. One reason is that it was pretty straightforward to assess the connectivity for local ISPs, whereas for a big national provider, who knows if the path to their web server (for example) is similar to what you'll experience from their local POP? With a local provider you can be pretty confident that their internal network is not huge. It also helps that since writing my Cortland rant, I've found a $0.06/min calling card, which makes long distance access to my ISP a lot cheaper than it was. Would I save enough on phone bills to offset the time required to look up local access number & configure the dialup connection every time I travel? I dunno. Maybe I'll switch one of these days. Or maybe its not worth the trouble.

ISP vs Work Dialups

Although I don't expect it to last, ORNL does have its own dialups. So why do I pay for ISP service? Although they're certainly not as bad as some employers I've heard of ORNL definitely has policies about what constitutes appropriate use of their network bandwidth. Having a personal ISP account allows me to avoid worrying about this kind of thing. It also gives me a "backup" email account, and a place to post web pages (like this one) that ORNL might not find sufficiently business-oriented to post there.