The cable guy came to set up my 8mbit service this morning. Seemed simple enough. Setting up the physical connection was simply a matter of connecting cables in my building’s cable box.
Setting up the rest, on the other hand, sucked. The guy insisted that he had to install some software on my mac. He said I could uninstall it as soon as he was done, but that it needed to be installed to get the setup finished. Fine, so he goes to the comcast internal site and downloads an installer. It decompresses, at which point I can see “Microsoft Internet Explorer” go by. Uh oh. So apparently, to get over their website compatibility issues, they require that you install MSIE 5, which runs under classic, to set up the installer. Totally lame. Turns out though, the thing couldn’t find IE (even though it’s inside its own application bundle), and so it just kept complaining that I don’t have IE5.
Fine, try it on the windows box. But for some reason, the windows box can’t grab an IP from DHCP (I figured out later that for some reason you do have to reboot the cable modem if you decide to hook the ethernet cable elsewhere.. lame, yet again. I thought the cable modem is just a bridge between your ethernet and their cablenetwork. Apparently its not. Apparently it has some state of its own.)
Finally, the guy just radio’s into someone and asks if he can set up a ‘push’. I tell him the IP that my mac got, and he tells the person on the other end. Then 10 seconds later, all is fine.
Why the need for the software then?! Why didn’t he just do this the first time we hooked up the powerbook. Aside from the fact that he insisted on trying his software CD (which contained the exact same file as was downloaded, and thus resulted in, you guessed it, the exact same error), he also mentioned to me that ‘macs are just really unpredictable’. I’m not a zealot, but dude, it’s not the mac, it’s your software that sucks balls.
Anyhow, after everything started working, I ran the speed test. 8600kbps. Damn. If I run it through the airport, I only get about 6500kbps, but oh well.. that’s good enough for me.