On Fri, Jun 1, 2012 at 2:06 PM, Seth Mattinen <sethm@rollernet.us> wrote:
Forgive me if this is a stupid question since I've never been a cable guy, but what's physical difference between residential and commercial coax?
Not much, as far as I can tell. I'm a commercial ("Business Class" in Comcast's terminology) coax customer; the CPE is just plugged into the cable outlet in my apartment. Comcast requires you to use the CPE they supply if you want a static IP up through a /28 on commercial coax, which is kind of a shame. (Also, a /28 seems to be the largest block they will give you over commercial coax.) Their CPE announces your address space into Comcast's network with RIPv2, and presumably they don't wish to share the RIP credentials with small customers. In the past, the admin ("mso") passwords were the same on all of their commercial coax CPE so you could tinker if desired, but that is no longer the case. Some people have speculated that there are different QAMs (frequencies) for commercial vs residential customers, but I have not seen any indication that that is the case. Finally, there is no 250 GB cap on commercial coax service, for now. (Not that that's a physical difference.) -Rusty