Peter,
There's no phone line--it's all done via the cable line. But you do need a separate cable for your TV and your internet. In my case it would have cost something like $47/mo for cable internet, and for $2/mo extra they gave me basic cable.
Installation was something like $100 which included bringing in the cable lines for TV and internet, an ISA NIC, and hooking everything up and installing the RoadRunner software and NIC. If I had wanted a PCI NIC it would have been about $40 more. They supply the cable modem (Motorola) for free. They wouldn't allow me to save $ by doing the installation myself because they need to verify proper installation for future trouble-shooting. TW didn't go into this project half-assed. The product, for an ISP, has been exceptional. A salesman I talked to at the best local ISP in my area (the one that offers fixed one-way wireless) has a lot of respect for TW's execution of their internet system. It seems that the systems offered by some companies are subject to degradation as more people come on-line and the total throughput for a particular neighborhood is divided between more and more homes. Time-Warner somehow designed their system to avoid this. I hope I'm not speaking too soon, but I continue to marvel at the value I'm getting compared to the folks (the majority of the world) stuck with dialup, ISDN, satellite, etc. A hidden beauty is that it doesn't tie up a phone line, so in effect you are paying more like $35/mo. Average download speeds are 700Kbits/sec, and have been as high as 1100. I don't know about uploads--guess I should check one day--but I believe it's the same.
I have heard that TCI@Home in some communities has been a nightmare, so all cable internet is not created equal. Some places you have to buy your own modem.
I never had a real good ISP before TW, and I never had 56K, so I might have been able to survive if I had got that hooked up. I may never find out...
Hope I covered everything--
wily
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