Up until about a week ago, I was one of the few Time Warner Cable subscribers in Charlotte, NC who was unable to order what's marketed as Wideband Internet.  The service has been generally available for subscribers since around September or October of 2010.  Anyway, I finally haz it!  Below is a tiny review.

Back in 2005 when I moved to Charlotte, the fastest high speed data (HSD) service I could get was 5 Mbps downstream and 384 Kbps upstream from Time Warner Cable.  Boy, that seems slow.  Over the years the service improved and up until recently my cable modem was configured for 15 Mbps down and 1Mbps up.  The downstream included PowerBoost, which is essentially a fancy name for bursting, a feature of the existing rate-limiting technology (a policer) that has been used in cable modems since the dawn of DOCSIS.  In the case of PowerBoost, the burst size limit of the policer is much larger, allowing for downstream throughput to exceed 20 or even 30 Mbps for a short duration of time until the tokens in the policer run out.  This is usually a few seconds, which is good enough to make a page with several images load much faster.

Anyway, everything before the so-called wideband was implemented with DOCSIS 1.1, which has a limit of roughly 42 Mbps downstream and 10 Mbps upstream shared between all subscribers off a particular node (typically a housing development or part of one).  The Wideband Internet is based on DOCSIS 3.0, which among other things allows for channel bonding, therefore providing more physical bandwidth, resulting in a sharp speed increase.  The 42 Mbps downstream is multiplied by the number of channels as is the now 30 Mbps upstream (added in DOCSIS 2.0).  Other technologies like SDV have been implemented over time to free up more bandwidth, so DOCSIS 3.0 can be configured to channel bond to its heart's delight.  Time Warner Cable currently has two wideband offerings implemented with DOCSIS 3.0: 30 Mbps down / 5 Mbps up and 50 Mbps down / 5 Mbps up.  I ended up getting the latter.

Alright, down to the specifics.

I scheduled my install between 17:00 and 19:00 EDT on a Friday, so I would have the weekend to play with things and not have to worry about getting up early the next day for work.  Er, not really.  Turns out it was the only slot available at the time.  The technician came, removed my old Ambit modem, and put in a Ubee Interactive DDW3611 cable modem.  I let him do his thing, knowing full well I was going to reconfigure things after he left, which I did.  So, just to test, I only plugged the new modem into MacBook Air, in order to test the speed.  After a few calls back to the office, the technician got everything provisioned right and the on-net speed test indicated I was getting slightly more than 50 Mbps down and 5 Mbps up.

By the way, Ambit changed its name to Ubee Interactive (get it?  you be interactive.. don't worry, I didn't get it at first) back in 2009.

Since the Ubee DDW3611 is a router with wireless, both features that I don't need or want (no double NAT, thanks!), I ended up using instructions here (keeping in mind the | is actually an l) to turn the modem back into bridged mode.  If you're going to do this, disable the wireless first, otherwise you will need to put the modem back into NAT/router mode to do so.

After a few more speed tests, it was apparent that my downstream and upstream were slightly higher than advertised.  And indeed.. they were!  The operational configuration from the Ubee cable modem showed me configured for roughly 54 Mbps down and 5.4 Mbps up:

In addition to the speed increase, the latency of my connection to the first hop (the CMTS at the hub site) decreased slightly:

Although the installation was fairly easy, I initially lost my elevated CPE limit, which is the number of MAC addresses the cable modem will learn on its Ethernet interface.  I had a CPE limit of three prior to the wideband installation, and one afterwards.  A call on Monday fixed this, and both of my Juniper firewalls and Linux router were all back online.

Overall, I'm happy with the service, and it has been rock-solid since the installation!

Update: Contrary to what one of my coworkers told me, it looks like there's absolutely no way to completely disable the wireless radio(s) in the DDW3611.  Even in NAT mode there is no drop down to disable it.  The best I've been able to do is disconnect the antennas and enable MAC filtering and don't list any allowed addresses.

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