Why Comcast can suck on my left nut!

So unless you have been in a closet, you most likely know that Comcast has been "traffic shaping". While I understand that p2p is an issue with bandwidth. I can understand that Comcast would rather find a way to eliminate traffic than to expand their capabilities. I do not p2p, I do not run a server on my home network, my use is residential only, email, webbrowsing, gaming.

I pay a decent amount of money to Comcast each month because it is the only broadband available in my area. I am impressed at the speed and low pings I get. However lately Comcast in its efforts to "shape traffic" has affected me.

At first I was unable to connect to my offices VPN, they did fix that. Next they made it so I was unable to send email through offices email servers web interface. What are they doing? In essence they are blocking most ports that aren't your standard ports, also when there is a large transfer they have been caught forging packet to send "rst" commands which will end the transfer.

When the FCC heard about this abuse, they actually took action (actually I think congress found out and passed it to the FCC in an effort to reopen net neutrality talks). Yesterday in Boston the FCC had a hearing about this abuse. Now the reports are out that Comcast paid people off the street to line up 1.5 hours before the hearing and fill the entire hearing room in an effort to block testimony on the subject.

Linky

I will be writing to my representation and I would be glad if any of you would like to do the same.

That is eff'ed up to say the least...

I work from home over a VPN... I use many different ports due to work and games and just playing around with thing... Blocking ports is something that should only be done on a local level, not at the WAN level...

I do understand them wanting to make it to where p2p and other things are not taxing the hell out of their network, but I would really like to know if the money they get from subscribers is not covering the load and need for expanding...

Face it, the more customers you have the more traffic you are going to have... If your not bringing in enough money to support it then you screwed up and need to raise your prices. [and should also have many price plans to support the different levels of users.] No matter what, a company should be making money off of its customers and it sounds like Comcast is not doing so.

If they are not making money but they are charging the same amount as others that are making money, then they need to look at their model... Do they have too many employees? Layoff time... Are they using equipment that is overkill for the use, return those high priced items and lease lower cost items... Are the executives taking up all of their profits in salary? Out them and replace them with people that makes less money...

The other part that makes no sense to me, is by trying to regulate the pipes they are starting to take responsibility for what is moving over those pipes.

I'm really worried Time Warner will start doing this.

The other side of this is if things keep going to the way they are going, I expect we will start to see traffic tiers instead of speed tiers. IE, You can use 5GB a month for 39.95 or you can use 40GB a month for 99.95.

And as much as I hate to say this, it makes some sense. I mean, every other service is a metered service, Electricity, Gas, etc....

Think about it. In place like where you like Bubba, they can effectively say pay up or go away.

Atomm wrote:The other side of this is if things keep going to the way they are going, I expect we will start to see traffic tiers instead of speed tiers. IE, You can use 5GB a month for 39.95 or you can use 40GB a month for 99.95.

And as much as I hate to say this, it makes some sense. I mean, every other service is a metered service, Electricity, Gas, etc....

I think I just died a little inside.

Doc, I didn't come up with this idea. It has been floated on various websites as a way for ISP's to bypass the net neutrality issue. In a sense, it flips net neutrality. Instead of charging Google to send you data, they charge you to receive data.

I'm not for it, but this is going to continue to come to a head. As far as I'm concerned, I blame the Telco's, Cable Companies and the FCC for this mess. Instead of trying to stay ahead, they've tried to milk it for all it's worth and now the US is something like 45th on the Broadband list. Heck, in Japan, you can get 20/20Mbps Cable for $30 and that's out on an airbase in the middle of nowhere.

Atomm wrote:Doc, I didn't come up with this idea. It has been floated on various websites as a way for ISP's to bypass the net neutrality issue. In a sense, it flips net neutrality. Instead of charging Google to send you data, they charge you to receive data.

I'm not for it, but this is going to continue to come to a head. As far as I'm concerned, I blame the Telco's, Cable Companies and the FCC for this mess. Instead of trying to stay ahead, they've tried to milk it for all it's worth and now the US is something like 45th on the Broadband list. Heck, in Japan, you can get 20/20Mbps Cable for $30 and that's out on an airbase in the middle of nowhere.

I didn't think it was something you were pushing. I still died a little, mainly because you're probably right.

Well, I think there is some reality to it Atomm, though start charging people large amounts and suddenly municipal high speed networks will start popping up. The reason they aren't quite there yet is because the towns don't want to deal with it.

Though I can say I don't mind that so much and in fact last year comcast introduced a tiered plan where you paid $10 more per mo and you got higher bandwidth and 'priority' on large downloads. I paid for a few months and found it wasn't worth it to me

I loath Comcast. I tried them out twice. Once I was on a dead end street and the service sucked as I was last on the link, the second time when I moved they had a 2gig limit on newsgroups unless you paid another $15 a month on top of the $55 for unlimited bandwidth. The download speed was ok, but the upload speed wasn't that great and they were blocking certain ports that stopped running any game servers.

When I couldn't get ventilo or teamspeak working right I dropped it and went lowspeed verizon.
I've been thinking about dumping the cable all together. $60 a month for TV and they have steadily dropped channels and put them on their digital package. I dont' watch that much TV, but when you do, your bombarded with comcast commercials, sometimes up to a dozen an hour.

Lexx, Tivo is your friend...... :-)