[ale] Comcast Business Class experiences?

Jim Kinney jim.kinney at gmail.com
Wed Mar 25 12:54:50 EDT 2009


Read the fine print on the SLA before you jump ship to Comcast.

Oh. I forgot. There ISN'T an SLA. It's a "best effort" 24 hour to
respond agreement.

Same thing on the AT&T "new" DSL uverse stuff.

Speakeasy has a 4 hour SLA on line repair through Covad and Covad has
a similar one the phone co monkeys. Granted, unless you are running
the business DSL Speakeasy won't give _you_ the 4 hour SLA. But they
have always met or exceeded that time line.

With Comcast and AT&T, you will be a fly speck in the cash stream for
them. With Speakeasy, their line support agreements with the last mile
provider makes them a formidable player. Not a flyspeck player.

If your speed is less than what was sold (i.e. next tier down) call
and they will fix it.

Speakeasy is the ONLY part of Best Buy that actually work well and 2
years after the buy-out it still meets or exceeds the expectations and
offerings of other "tube suppliers". It does cost a bit more but the
reliability has been worth the expense. The outage last week was all
of 5 minutes. I don't know the details but had the look and feel of a
fried core router table.

On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 11:20 AM, Chris Woodfield <rekoil at semihuman.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> So sadly, I think it's time to ditch Speakeasy - can't justify the
> cost anymore, especially since I haven't been able to get a full 6Mbps
> in a long time. The last national outage kinda sealed the deal for
> me...I'm in Midtown Atlanta, if that helps...
>
> So, I'm looking at Comcast's "Business Class" service - from talking
> to a rep, I'm looking at saving about $30/month if I go with their
> 6Mbps/1Mbps service and get 5 static IPs (The speakeasy plan I was on
> included 4, and gives me 768K up). I can make do with a single static
> and shave off another $5/month, but I'm not keen on having to set up
> port forwarding.
>
> So, a couple questions -
>
> How reliable/responsive *is* the Business Class service compared to
> Comcast residential? I've heard the myriad horror stories, but they
> all seem to come from the residential customers. Any insights/
> experiences from Business customers here?
>
> Does Comcast apply bandwidth caps/port blocking to Business Class
> customers?
>
> How is the CPE set up - I've seen forum posts suggesting that it's not
> a true bridge, and that even a static IP is set up as some sort of 1-
> to-1 NAT on the CPE. This will break my 6in4 tunneling (unless the CPE
> can terminate the tunnel), so I'd like to know if it can be set up in
> a true bridging mode.
>
> All in all, think it's worth the money I'd be saving to make the move?
>
> Thanks in advance...
>
> -C
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> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
>



-- 
-- 
James P. Kinney III


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