from an IPer -- A few details on Continental Cable/PSI home internet service

[David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

Date: Wed, 9 Mar 94 16:18:19 -0500
From: wpress () cfata4 harvard edu (Bill Press)


Since I live in Cambridge, subscribe to Continental Cablevision, and
read the New York Times, I was naturally on the phone first thing this
morning with a PSI sales rep ("Parker" at 1-800-827-7482 x1382).


Parker hadn't had his complete promotional training yet, so the facts
are tentative, but here they are:


Service will actually commence (orders will be taken) on April 8.  The
actually installation (plumbing) will be by regular Continental
installers.  (PSI is located in the DC area.) All the installer needs
to do is split the line and pipe it into a box that PSI will provide.
What comes out the other end of the box is 10base2 (thinwire)
ethernet, for connection to a customer-supplied ethernet card (PC) or
workstation ethernet port.


"Individual" service is $250 to install, plus $99 per month if you
want MAN (metro area network) access only, or $125 per month if you
want "the whole internet".  For this fee you get up to 3 IP addresses
within the domain psi.com (probably something like numbering consecutively
from c00001.psi.com).  (There may be a few dollars per month extra for
more than one IP address, but 3 is the hard limit for this fee level.)
"The access is 500 kbits" (into the home?  out of the home?).


"Small Business service" is $2000 installation plus $400 per month.
You then can get up to 16 IP addresses.  You can have your own domain
name in the form "anything.com".  PSI will provide field service and
"security filtering" (whatever that is).  This level of service "uses
different channels on the cable".  Fewer users loaded onto each
channel?  One only guesses at this point.


Bill Press