I took the weekend off and fled to Pitman, NJ (“Everyone likes Pitman!”) for a bit of R&R… which, in Jason-speak, means setting up computers and networks. Shannon’s parents needed a bit of persuading to graduate to the wonderful world of cable modems, so we came down here to set them up.

What we learned, though, is that the collapse of @Home is as bad for the cable modem industry as everyone is saying. The provider down here, Comcast, relied on @Home for its tier 2 service, and now is scrambling to move people over to its own backbone. While doing it, they are promising things that they cannot deliver to prospective customers, and even yanking things away from old customers, generally screwing everything up royally.

Examples? Well, despite being part of the advertised service, new subscribers won’t get any email addresses until February 28th; this was a service previously handled by @Home, and Comcast won’t be able to take it over until then. Another big thing lacking (which bit us on the ass bigtime) is multiple IP addresses — not only will they currently not give new subscribers more than one IP address, but the supervisor to whom I spoke said that they have to yank any multiple IP addresses from old customers once they migrate them onto the new backbone, at least until they “get the capacity in place.”

I guess my warning to everyone is this: if you’re signing up for any cable modem service right now, be sure to ask about everything up front, and get their promises in writing from someone at a supervisor level. You’ll be glad you did.